Hi, Dear Reader. It’s early afternoon on Thursday, June 8, 2023, here in Lithia, Florida. Outside, it’s quite warm (83°F/29° but feels like 90°F/32°C under partly sunny skies) on this humid early summer day. Of course, I’m inside an air-conditioned house, with my blinds closed and my curtains only partially open, so my writing space is nice, dimly lit, and cool. I’ve got some light orchestral music playing on my Amazon Music app, and at some point in the afternoon I will get down to the business of working on the manuscript for Reunion: Coda.
I’m still trying to figure out just how to start Scene Four in Chapter Nine; I know what is going to happen – it is preordained since it is an incident I mention in some detail in my novella, Reunion:
“How did your finals go?” Mark asked.
“I only had one test this morning – in economics. We didn’t have a test in chorus.” I looked at Mark, then at my Spork. A piece of Salisbury steak was impaled on its tines. Cold gravy dripped onto the tray with little wet splashing sounds. I put the plastic utensil on the tray. Suddenly I wasn’t very hungry anymore.
“Oh, yeah,” Mark said. I could almost see the proverbial light bulb clicking on above his head. “Mrs. Quincy left in March, didn’t she?” Mark was referring to the chorus director’s unexpected departure three months earlier; Mrs. Quincy had been offered the choral director’s position at the Julliard School of Music. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mrs. Quincy had said when she announced her decision, “and if there is anything I want you to learn from me is that you have to take advantage of these rare opportunities.”
Diaz-Granados, Alex. Reunion: A Story (pp. 17-18). Kindle Edition.
And, of course, the consequences of Mrs. Quincy leaving are not happy ones, and they will have a ripple effect on Jim, Marty, and the other members of the South Miami High School choral groups.
At this point in Chapter Nine, the event as described in Reunion is just over two months in the “future.” I ended Scene Three in the afternoon of January 3, 1983, and Mrs. Quincy makes her fateful announcement – just as her real-life counterpart, Ms. Joan Owen, did – sometime in March of 1983. (I don’t remember the exact date; I do recall that it was after my birthday – March 5 – and that it seemed to be like a “bolt out of the blue.” (And no, Ms. Owen wasn’t recruited by Julliard; that part is fictional. But she was wooed away by another school, and it was one of the “lowlights” of my senior year.)
I still have to decide how I’m going to write the scene; it’s not a matter of if, since the aftermath of Mrs. Quincy’s departure is a plot point in Reunion; it’s more of how much of this event I want to write about, and the mechanics of writing the scene. And, until I make that decision, it’s all quiet on the writing front.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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