Daynote - Wed 7 May

Ah, the blank page. It's weird, right? When you're facing a blank page you yearn for something already done that you can polish up, because blank pages are scary. But when you're deep in an edit trying to find words to cut from paragraphs you've already flensed nearly to the bone, an empty notebook and a cup of coffee and all the other cliches look extremely appealing.

ON DECK: I persevered through already-polished pages this morning and got a decent -343 words cut. But I'm definitely at the 'am I making this worse?' stage of the edit. Nothing to do but persevere.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: A word on technique - when I do this kind of on-screen edit (i.e. not working from paper or eReader notes, but reading every scene and page in linear order) I make a lot of use of Scrivener's composition mode. I have the text size dialled up to 400%, I have the project statistics window in the top left (so I can see live overall word count and how much I've cut or added in the session) and I have the inspector window in the top right (so I can see the scene's status and any edit notes I might have left in the scene summary).

I also have the background set to dark green and the text set to light green, which I find very easy on the eyes. Here's an example of what that looks like, using a scene from A RELUCTANT SPY:

This mode is very customisable, and you can use keyboard shortcuts to hop from one scene to the next. I also find the large text size easier on the eyes, and it stops me skimming because I can only see a paragraph or two at once. Sometimes I'll even bump it up to 600%, although that is comically large. I'd estimate I probably spend about 80-90% of my time in Scrivener looking at a screen like this (though I hide the word count panel when I'm drafting, since I don't draft to hard targets).

LISTENING: Joe Abercrombie is doing the rounds on a lot of the podcasts I listened to, and I enjoyed his appearance on SFFAddicts yesterday.

WATCHING: The latest episode of THE LAST OF US last night. It's wild seeing how closely they've matched some of the game environments, while obviously cutting the hours and hours of sneaking around killing people that is the actual game. It's a fascinating piece of adaptation.

READING: A bit of crit reading last night, then more of my fantasy novel beta read. Nothing I can talk about in here, unfortunately, but that's what happens when you have writer friends - half your reading time ends up spent on unpublished work. Which is an immense privilege, to be clear. But boy does it slow down your TBR stack progress.

LINK: A really good piece by D.V. Bishop on what it's actually like being a midlist writer (and how you can help your favourite authors as a reader).

UP NEXT: You guessed it - more line editing and polish. This will be me until the end of the month. Some exciting things brewing I can't talk about yet, in multiple areas, but stay tuned.

Onward!