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This is INFODUMP 42.
Wind kills birds

I'm going to be mercifully brief this time around, because, despite my determination to divide this newsletter up and write it in daily bite-sized chunks, I find myself writing most of it in one go on a Saturday afternoon. I'm keen to lie down and read a book, so I'm racing through this. Here goes...


I'm in that weird liminal space where work APPEARS to be easing up, when in fact it isn't. Because I'm a process nerd, I break down every job I have into the smallest possible constituent parts (write 5 pages, proof, edit etc) and then schedule those stages across the length of the project. I've written about this before. Basically, it allows me to work on multiple projects simultaneously. More recently, I have been "time blocking", not as strictly as the methodology usually suggests, but I give each ongoing project an hour a day, and within that hour I do whatever needs to be done, whether it be writing, proofing etc. I'm not as strict as I should be with the time, but it does allow me to plan the days and to get a decent amount of work done and, crucially, to block out time for things other than work.

The upshot of all of this is that projects slip into delivery without a big fanfare or a frantic rush to deadline. And so, over the past week or so, I have found myself delivering a few things that I have been working on for a while. Now, when I look at my daily to do list, it seems light. The reason that this is an illusion is because, for a lot of those projects, the ball has gone to the other end of the court; execs are reading what I've sent them and could come back with notes at any moment. That's the unpredictable factor, and all it takes is for two sets of execs to respond simultaneously and I'm deluged again.

I'm now working on re-drafts of a couple of episodes of a thing I'm doing for Netflix, some tweaks to a movie script, and a feature film treatment which I'm writing alongside the lead actor (so that is sporadic work because it has to fit with that actor's schedule). Our new podcast, TEMPORAL, has temporarily moved out of the writers room and the team are quietly working on Episodes 2,3 and 4 with minimal input from me. THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH is now being edited and, again, that will bounce back to me occasionally but listening to that never feels like work anyway.

Now is the time I need to be digging into my notes to identify the next thing I'm going to work on by myself. I have a big TV project starting in a few weeks, and that might even be enough of a window to get a completely new thing done. If I only knew what that new thing was...


Notion has really come into its own for me over the last few weeks (I would love to explain what Notion is, for those who don't know, but it's impossible - click that link, they give it a good go).

Where before I thought Notion was clever but didn't really have much of a clue what to do with it, I have recently spent some time getting to grips with it. On the personal side, I've created several areas for projects and daily tasks/notes/journals etc and now it's where I spend a lot of my time. I've also moved all the notes for our TEMPORAL podcast series over to there. The writers are now able to go to Notion to access character notes, episode outlines, world notes, research links etc - everything is interrelated with backlinks, like a big wiki document. To be fair, I think the environment is a little daunting for anyone who hasn't used it before, but I'm hoping it will prove useful.

For me, Notion finds itself being as close to an app-that-does-everything as I have yet found. I'm becoming more and more comfortable writing within it (this edition of the newsletter is being composed entirely within Notion) and, now that I've made all the rookie mistakes (hopefully) and absorbed a bunch of tutorials, I feel like I can finally get it do what I want it to do.

I've also been playing around with Noted today, which is an app designed for taking notes on audio recordings. With a little jiggery pokery, the newest update allows you to make live notes on a Zoom call, whilst recording the call. Each note you make is time-stamped, so that when you click it, it jumps to that part of the audio. Very useful for meetings and virtual writers rooms. Noted also does some version of transcription, but it seems a bit limited and I'd still go to Otter for that.


We watched "The Trial Of The Chicago 7" on Netflix, which was fantastic. I've heard elsewhere that it hasn't had great reviews, but I don't tend to read reviews, so I went in blind and really enjoyed it.

I've also been reading Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club 2", which is a sequel to his novel, this time in graphic novel form. It's every bit as twisted as you'd expect.

The John Coltrane documentary "Chasing Trane" is well worth a look on Netflix.

I finished "The Dark Forest" by Cixin Liu, which was awesome - a proper acceleration from the first book.

Music recommendations for this week; "Song Machine", the new album by Gorillaz; "Blue Note: Reimagined" (the first track, Jorja Smith's take on Rose Rouge, got me listening back to St Germain's fantastic Tourist from twenty years ago); Anja Lechner and Francois Couturier's "Lontano" is perfect thinking music.


Precious few links this week, because I haven't been trawling the net very much (and the stuff I have read has been mostly behind paywalls)


That's your lot. It's time now for me to figure out how well Notion exports to MailChimp...

(Oh my God, it's AMAZING)

I'll see you next time.

Fuck it. Send.
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