Watcher, geezer/geezeress?

#Music

I’ve been obsessing with listening to Autechre over the last week. I very much doubt you’ll like them, but...

This is off LP5, their eponymous fifth album, which is widely regarded as the tipping point from their accessible earlier stuff to the abstract unlistenable electronic bleeps and clicks. They don’t so much write the music as programme it into a laptop, then get it playing sounds until they like what they hear. Dance music, it isn’t!

#Last Week

Okay, so my first big thing last week was breaking Marshall 6 down from a synopsis to an outline. This is mainly making sure I’ve got a certain number of chapters and a flow between them. The synopsis was mainly Marshall’s POV with some notes on other plot points – this is where I decide on who the other POVs are and make sure there are enough of them to make it not jarring. So there are two supporting POVs, one who hasn’t been done for a wee while and another who is a monster. Anyway, that was all done and sent off to edit, which was fairly minor. Lovely!

The other big task was finishing my edit of the Dodds 1 redraft. One of those things I shouldn’t have started, but I’ll be glad it’s done. The main driver for these was to get a better quality book over to Angus King for his narration. The first cut was done back-to-back with Vicky 4 and was a bit underbaked, so I’ve fleshed it out into a full novel now. Anyway, the book was finished on Saturday and is off to the proof reader – hopefully it’ll be back soon, then I can update stuff with the 2024 edition. As I’ve said before, anyone who has bought the ebook edition will get this one free on Amazon; it’s worth it for the new material!

#This Week

Started writing Marshall 6 this afternoon. Which involved me sorting through my old emails, sending off a few invoices and such. Because I’d outlined a chapter I wasn’t too keen on. The information from it comes out in the first four chapters of investigation, so it wasn’t working well for me. Anyway, I shifted back to an earlier one.

It’s partly why I asked for a preference on Facebook about opening chapters: killer’s POV; victim’s; discoverer’s? And there are some people who skip such a chapter, which baffles me, but what’s your preference?

The rest of this week will be getting into my pendulum motion of editing yesterday and writing today. 65 chapters to write, so it’s going to be a reasonable slog.

Looking like the release date will be 30th September.

And here’s a photo from Neidpath tunnel near Peebles.

I probably need to revisit at some point to refresh my nonexistent, as Pringle would say.

Have a good week – I’ll be at Capital Crime in that London this weekend. See you there?

Cheers,
Ed