Musings & Thoughts for Wednesday, July 19, 2023, or: Adios, Mami – Eight Years Later (And My Writing Plan for the Day)

Late Morning, Wednesday, July 19, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, there, Dear Reader. Well, it’s “Hump Day” – Wednesday – morning, and not surprisingly, it’s shaping up to be another steamy late July day here in the Tampa Bay area. The sun has been up for only a couple of hours, and already the temperature is 80°F/27°C. Add 83% humidity and a slow southeasterly breeze of 3 MPH/5 KMH, and the feels-like temperature becomes 85°F/29°C. Per the forecast on my Weather app, today is going to follow the same pattern established on Monday: sunny and hot in the morning, with scattered rain showers in the afternoon. The high is expected to reach 94°F/34°C.

Today is the eighth anniversary of my mother’s death, so I’m not in the best of moods. I know that the Universe is inherently unfair and that we must try and roll with the punches, but I think that my mother deserved a far better, and less painful ending to her life. As I wrote several years ago on her obituary page on the Dignity website:

My mom wasn’t perfect. She was human, and as such, she had human flaws. That having been said, she was smart, generous to a fault, trustworthy, fair-minded, funny, and incredibly patient.

I couldn’t have asked for a better mother. And I loved her to the Moon and back.

I miss you tons, Mami.

I need to focus on other things, so that’s all I will say about the Dreaded Anniversary.

On Writing & Storytelling

One of those “other things” that I need to attend to is, of course, my manuscript for Reunion: Coda. I worked on it yesterday, but I only managed to add one new paragraph to Chapter 10, Scene Two. That’s better than nothing, I suppose, but I had hoped to write more than that.

I will, of course, try to work on the novel today. It’s one of the things that keep me going these days, and I still harbor the – perhaps naïve – hope that Reunion: Coda will be the book that will be my breakthrough work and sell enough copies to make it worth my time to be a writer. I’ll write it anyway because the story means a lot to me, but I also would like to be a best-selling author and be self-sufficient.

On the other hand, – and non-writers out there will never be able to understand this – if I am not at my best physically, mentally, and/or emotionally, all of my hopes and good intentions don’t mean squat. I’ve tried – really tried – to write or perform other complicated tasks when I’m down or angry (and lately, I tend to be both), and it usually does not yield good results. As one of my writing friends told me the other day, “Hang in there. Writing when you are struggling isn’t a fun experience. You will work your way through it.”

I do plan to work my way through it, and I do hope I can get into a more positive mindset before midday/early afternoon. But…we’ll just have to see what develops.