Things on My Mind….

I woke up incredibly early this morning. Not at 4 AM, thankfully, but it was still pitch-dark when – as is all too familiar an occurrence for me – I was awakened by a full bladder and the need to pee. Of course, I ventured forth to the bathroom across the hall, did my business, and ambled blearily back to my futon. I tried to fall asleep again, but even after what seemed like an eternity of tossing, turning, and muttering softly about just wanting 10 more minutes of sleep, I surrendered to reality and got up.

I brewed two cups of Folger’s Colombian coffee in the big Kitchen Aid coffeemaker we have in the kitchen – I briefly thought about either heating up a slice of a Big New Yorker pizza I ordered late last night or grabbing a bowl of cereal for breakfast, but I rejected both options – and consumed them while I read an article from the next-to-last issue of Time magazine. I would have preferred reading today’s newspaper, but no one here subscribes to the Tampa Bay Times, so I must work with what I have.

Anyway, one of the things that kept me from sleeping – other than anxiety over my future and frets about whether I’ll ever try dating someone again after my most recent relationship disaster – was my new story. I have not added any words to the almighty daily word count in a while; I haven’t been motivated enough to sit, think, and immerse myself in the world of Project X lately.

I’m in procrastination mode again, it seems, and even though I justify it by telling myself that I’m selling (or trying to sell) my existing novella, Reunion, the true root cause is a combination of depression, fear of not being able to write a delightful story, and the never-ending worries about the future.

The Leitmotif Question

Speaking of Reunion, late yesterday afternoon, while I was hunting in the wilderness of YouTube for music videos to listen to while working on my blog, I decided to search for Forgotten Dreams, a 1954 composition for piano and orchestra written by Leroy Anderson in the 1950s.

I first heard Forgotten Dreams in an Evening at Pops telecast sometime in the early 1980s, during John Williams’ tenure as principal conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. It’s a short piece – two minutes and 30 seconds long in total – and was originally written as a piano learning exercise before Anderson fine-tuned it and gave it more musical heft for its 1954 debut.

Forgotten Dreams is a melancholic little piece, and it so haunted me after I heard it that when I wrote Reunion many years later, I named one of the novella’s chapters after it.

I promised myself that I would not work on the new story on weekends – Stephen King says it’s not healthy to work on any writing project without breaks, and weekends should be days off from the task of writing – so I won’t be fiddling with Project X today (even though there’s a petulant voice inside my head berating me for not wanting to work).

However, there are no rules that say I can’t think about writing-related topics, even if they’re aspirational ones, such as What if I adapted Reunion as a screenplay? How would that work out?

Consequently, since I have been clipping bits and pieces of Reunion and asking the OpenAI/Bing chatbot to rewrite them in the styles of different writers, the idea of turning my existing novella into a movie also raised an interesting question: what would a theme for Marty sound like?

There are, of course, countless pieces, mostly classical compositions or movie themes that might work, but Forgotten Dreams makes a suitable (if short) leitmotif for the girl of Jim Garraty’s dreams.

What do you think, Dear Reader? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below!

For the “End Credits” – Patti’s suggestion would work: