In the middle of the second editing pass of Troubleseeker, my third Troubleshooter installment. The house is quiet, kids and wife in bed sleeping, night has fallen. Moody light to keep visual distraction low.

On the iTunes rotation I had some prefab Beatles playlist from Apple Music under the curated topic "Beatles at Night". Was a good one, many deep cuts like "Mr. Moonlight", "I'll be back", or the fantastic "Long long long". After that I opened up the Radiohead page and simply pressed the random button. The hypnotic quality helps in the humdrum task to rewrite, root out my xxx's from within the text, and spot logical errors.

In the first pass writing process, I am neither patient with detailed descriptions, especially not of rooms or surroundings. For me, the flow of the story is everything at this point, mundane things like description, continuity, or character management goes to the background. So in order to keep the writing going, I simply type 'xxx' in the text to indicate that there is something missing. Sometimes labelled with what I think is missing 'xxxDescribeMan' would be a typical xxx entry.

Then either before or after the first edit pass, I'll use the global search function and bring up the list of xxx. One after one needs attention. Not a task I prefer, as it is a very mechanical and time consuming, making details up, balancing description and action flow, assuring continuity, doing research on topics. (Like just now: how many rounds do fit into a Beretta 71 Jaguar?)

So for this sort of work, I need intelligent background music, Radiohead fits this category exactly. And with so many years and albums under their belt, the number of songs is exhaustive.

I tinkered with some cover ideas for Troubleseeker. A sniper scope is a must have, dito is a London sights silhouette like London Eye, St. Pauls, and Westminster. So it might look something like this: