Musings & Thoughts for Monday, June 26, 2023, or: A Slow, Late Start to a Writer’s Workday

Hi, there, Dear Reader.

It’s afternoon here in Lithia, Florida, on Monday, June 26, 2023 – another torrid summer day in the Tampa Bay area. As I write this, the temperature outside is 92°F/33°C, but with a weak westerly breeze and humidity at 47%, the feels-like temperature is 95°F/36°C. It’s partly sunny, no rain or thunderstorms are expected, and the high for today will be 94°F/34°C. This is, I guess, to be expected in the subtropical region, but, man, it sure didn’t get this hot this early in the season when I was a kid or even a young adult.

I had a hard time falling asleep last night; I don’t know when I finally got drowsy, but I was still awake and watching an episode of The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick around 3 AM, so I might have gotten drowsy and turned the TV/Blu-ray player off between 3:30 AM and 4 AM.

 I do know that I woke up around 9:30 AM, three or so hours later than usual. Naturally, this means that (a) my day got off to a slow start and (b) that I’m unusually tired even after having breakfast, lunch, and a shower. Indeed, I think that the hot shower I took after I had ramen for my midday repast might have lowered my blood pressure, so now I’m sleepy, tired, and slow of thought.

Of course, this means today will be one of those “my Muse did not smile at me” days, and any “new work” on my novel will have to wait till tomorrow. I’m having enough of a hard time composing this, a relatively easy piece, so imagine how difficult it is for me to sit here and try to get into the world of Reunion: Coda to write all-new material for Chapter 10. Creating characters, situations, and their environments require using a great deal of mental energy, which in turn requires quite a bit of physical stamina, not just to “sit there and think,” but also to sit for hours on end in front of a computer, tap-tap-tapping away at a keyboard and writing a novel, one sentence at a time.

Nevertheless, I managed to get some work done on Scene Three, Chapter Eight (aka The Dream). I fixed a few grammatical errors I missed yesterday, then went ahead and replaced the existing version of the scene with the revised one on both the “official” Alpha file on Word and the WriteItNow save file. The Word .docx file will be the source for the Kindle Create upload when it’s time to self-publish Reunion: Coda, while the WriteItNow version will be a backup version, as well as the one where I can track the progress of the novel on the program’s “Story Board” function.

With that revision added to the official manuscript, Reunion: Coda – or whatever the final title ends up being – is now (per WriteItNow) 163 pages long, with a total word count of 40,555. (On Word, the figures are somewhat different: 99 pages and 41,216 words). This makes Reunion: Coda the longest composition – either for academia (i.e. research paper) or fiction – I’ve ever written. And, of course, since I’m not finished, the number of words (and pages) will increase, thus allowing me to release my novel as a hardcover book instead of just as a paperback. (Reunion: A Story, at 53 pages, is too short for Kindle Direct Publishing to release as a hardcover due to the cost of manufacturing books in that format.

Well, I don’t have much to say about my Sunday doings after I finished Scene Three, Chapter Eight, and I definitely don’t have much to say about today besides what I’ve told you already. I just hope that I sleep better tomorrow and wake up tomorrow feeling rested and ready to work on my novel. So, until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.