It’s almost noon as I sit here at my desk in my corner of Lithia, Florida, on Saturday, May 20, 2023. I’ve been up since 7:30 AM, which – per my usual schedule – amounts to “sleeping in late.” Oddly, I don’t remember checking the time before I fell asleep trying to watch Star Trek; The Motion Picture – The Director’s Edition. I do know that I was still up and about after midnight; I don’t wear a watch – I have bad luck with wristbands as they tend to break all too easily – and I have no idea where either of my trusty clock radios from my former home in Miami are. In a box in the garage, I am guessing. (I don’t have anywhere to put a clock radio in my room; I sleep on a futon and don’t have space for a nightstand, so…) My smartphone needs a new battery, so I rarely use it, and turning on the PC late at night after I turn it off is a recipe for insomnia. Thus, the only way for me to know what time it is at night – or when I wake up in the morning – is to walk to the kitchen and look at the digital clock on the stove.
Anyway, despite waking up later than usual, I’m sleepy, irritable, and not sure about how I want to spend my weekend. Saturday and Sunday are the two days when I usually do not (and should not) work on The New Story, but considering my post-Spring of 2020 circumstances, I don’t have too many options available. As I see it, I can (a) read a book while listening to instrumental music (Songs with lyrics are too much of a distraction while reading; the same goes for when I’m writing unless I am trying to come up with a romantic scene in The New Story.); (b) watch one of my 450 movies;[1] (c) watch whatever I can find on the family room TV; or (d) play one of several computer games I have in my Steam library, including Crusade in Europe, Cold Waters, Regiments, all of which are war games of different types and set in two different eras (The first title is a WWII real-time grand strategy game about the Allied campaign to liberate Western Europe, the other two are fictional scenarios of World War III; Cold Waters simulates submarine warfare, while Regiments depicts land warfare in an alternate version of 1989 divided Germany.), or adults-only games a la Being a DIK, Acting Lessons, Leap of Faith, or Freshwomen: Season 1.
I could also go out to the nearby park bench and read, but this being Florida in late spring – meteorological summer and the 2023 hurricane season both start on June 1 – I should have done that hours ago, cos now it’s 88°F/31°C and getting warmer, it’s shorts-and-T-shirt weather (I don’t look that great right now, so I don’t like wearing shorts.), and even though there’s no rain in the forecast, my Weather app does not advise me to go outside today.
Other than that…I don’t have many options to choose from.
What I don’t want to do is mess with The New Story today. I work on that project five days a week as if my life depends on it. (Well, I am a writer, and it is a project I promised myself that I’d see through to the end, even if I don’t end up with The Great American Novel and become a best-selling author after I self-publish it.) I like most of what I have in my first draft, and I have completed the rough version of eight chapters and started a ninth, so I have made significant progress with this story. But Stephen King, in his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, says that while writing is important and should not be approached lightly, he only writes X hours a day (usually from morning to early afternoon), then does other things during the rest of the day. He also takes weekends off, a habit that I am trying to get into because although writing is his vocation, he knows it’s not the only thing in life – and that writers should not become slaves to the desk and the computer.
Still, since I don’t have much of a social life, much less a romantic one; that ship set sail long ago, and my book (I don’t know if it’s a novella or a short novel, but since I’m on page 76 – per Word, which bases its page count on standard 8.5X11 pages – I bet that it’s going to be a short novel by the time I type “The End,” whenever that happens.) is the only thing that keeps me going, I might not be able to resist the temptation to tinker with the manuscript.
Well, it’s now half past 1 PM; I’m not Speedy Gonzales at the keyboard, especially when both my mood and energy levels are low. I better close for now and figure out what to do with the remains of the day. So, till next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.
[1] Yes, according to my stats page on Blu-ray.com, I own 450 unique titles; the reason why my Blu-ray – both 2K and 4K – collection has a tally of 535 2K HD Blu-rays and 111 4K is that I own multiple copies of some of my favorites, including – predictably, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Indiana Jones movies, although I also own Casablanca and other classic stand-alone films in multiple formats – DVD, HD Blu-ray, 4K UHD Blu-ray, and digital copies.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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