Hi, there.
It’s late morning in Lithia, Florida, on Saturday, May 27, 2023. It’s a nice late spring morning here; sunny, cool (it’s only 72°F/22°C) and the skies overhead are clear. It hardly seems like summer – meteorological summer, not astronomical (traditional) summer – is only a few days away, along with the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season. It’s not going to be a scorching hot day, so if I can get motivated, I may go outside for a walk or take a book to the nearby park and read for a while.
Since today is Saturday, and since it is a long holiday weekend (Monday will be Memorial Day 2023), I plan to take it easy and not work on The New Story. I don’t know what I will do for the balance of today and tomorrow; I no longer have anyone to hang out or make plans with, and although going out to the nearby park is definitely an option, I’m too introverted to seek out friends in the neighborhood. Besides, I’ll be moving to Brandon at some point in the future, so why even bother now?
Thus, any plans I make this weekend will involve solitary activities, and if you’re a regular visitor to this space, you know what my options are:
- Reading
- Listening to music (with or without reading at the same time)
- Watching a movie, miniseries, or TV series on DVD or Blu-ray
- Gaming
- Going out for a walk and reading at the park
- Writing
That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. No going out with friends (don’t know too many people in the Tampa Bay area), no dating, and no solo excursions to a movie theater or even a shopping mall.
I do know, though, that I will try to resist the impulse to work on The New Story today. I want to finish the first draft in three months or maybe less[1] per Stephen King’s advice in his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, but not at the expense of my mental health. I’m already overwhelmed by anxiety and other negative emotions; I don’t need to add any more stress by working seven days a week on a project that, even if it comes out halfway decent, might sell just a few copies on Amazon and Barnes & Noble Online, get me a handful of positive reviews, and…poof. That’s it. On to the next New Story!
Of course, if after I read, listen to music, watch something on TV, play a computer game, or even go out for a walk I get bored and restless, I will work on The New Story. Maybe I won’t write a new scene or chapter; I’ll probably just do some editing and revising.
But, honestly, I would rather not.
[1] I’ve already passed the one-month mark and written nearly 90 pages (on Word, which bases its page count on 8.5 X 11 sheets of printing paper. (WriteItNow, the standalone creative writing software I use for finessing and organizing The New Story, says I have 142 pages). I don’t plan to write a doorstop of a novel a la 11/23/63 or Red Storm Rising; my story doesn’t have a large cast of characters and is modest in scope and authorial ambition, but this is the longest anything I’ve written; the longest writing assignment I ever handed in when I made my brave but failed attempt at the “college thing” was a 64-page-long research paper on aerial warfare in Europe during World War II – and I wrote that in less time than I’ve spent on my current project.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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