Hi, there!
It’s late morning here in Lithia, Florida, on Wednesday, June 7, 2023. It’s relatively cool outside on this seventh day of the month and seventh day of meteorological summer (traditional summer is still two weeks away); the temperature is 74°/23°C under sunny conditions. This being Florida, it won’t stay this mild for long. The forecast calls for a high of 88°F/30°C and partly sunny skies – and high humidity, to boot. (On the positive side, there are no thunderstorms in the forecast. So, there’s that.)
“While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
As I mentioned in yesterday’s last post, I did some editing on my manuscript for Reunion: Coda (the working title for my first novel). I am not sure if the section I worked on needs more nips and tucks; I think the material is fine “as is” now, but a more seasoned writer or editor might not think so. I wish I could afford to pay a professional editor to, you know, edit the manuscript as soon as I finish the first draft, but I can’t. So…I’m just going to have to press on and do what I can with the skills I possess.
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
In any case, I don’t want to get fixated on that chapter – Seven – because I want to go ahead and at least complete Chapter Nine. My instincts tell me that all I need is one more scene, and that’ll be it for Nine – and on to Ten. I don’t do outlines, but since Chapter Nine is the backstory to an incident mentioned in Reunion: A Story, I know what is supposed to happen. I know how it plays out.[1] The only questions I have at the moment are:
- Do I end Chapter Nine on a cliffhanger, switch the narrative to the parallel storyline in Ten, then resolve the cliffhanger in Chapter Eleven?
- Or do I end Chapter Nine on a cliffhanger, resolve that cliffhanger in Chapter Ten, and then go to the parallel storyline?
(Like Reunion: A Story, the novel follows the narrator at two different stages of his life: the A storyline (as a Star Trek: The Next Generation writer would call the “main plot”) is set in February 2000, two years after the events in Reunion; the B storyline consists of flashbacks to the narrator’s high school years. A case could be made, of course, that the high school parts are the A story; they were in Reunion, after all. I’ll leave it for critics and readers to sort out, though!)
“While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.”
STEPHEN KING, “ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT”
I still have not decided if today is Edit and Revise Day 3 or Write New Scene Day 1. Even though I slept better last night, I still woke up much earlier than I wanted, so making work-related decisions is no easy thing right now.
I’m going to take a short break, rest for a bit, then come back to my desk and decide what to do – then I’ll either do more revisions or write all-new material. Regardless of what I decide, I will work on the story today – come what may.
[1] See Reunion: A Story, pages 17 and 31-32 (Kindle Edition).
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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