On Writing & Storytelling: A SITREP on ‘Reunion: Coda’ for August 3, 2023

Late Morning, Thursday, August 3, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, Dear Reader. As I write this, noon is less than three hours away, and yet it is shaping up to be another simmering high summer day here in the Tampa Bay area. Currently, the temperature (outside) is 82°F/27°C under mostly sunny conditions. However, with humidity at a whopping 83% and a sluggish 4 MPH/6 KMH breeze blowing from the east-northeast, the feels-like factor is 88°F. Of course, as the sun climbs higher and morning morphs into midday and afternoon, it’s going to be hotter – the forecast calls for mostly sunny skies, less than 20% chance of rain, and a high of 94°F/34°C.

The only redeeming quality for this hellishly hot Summer of ’23 is that so far, the Tampa Bay area has not seen any tropical storms or hurricanes anywhere near the vicinity. But since we are entering the peak period of the Atlantic hurricane season, I am not confident that this happy trend will continue till the end of the season (November 30).

In any case, I have no intention of going outside, thanks to the oppressive heat and my mulish unwillingness to venture forth. I should at least try, but depression tends to suppress even the slightest motivation to do even moderate exercise.

On Writing & Storytelling: A Quick SITREP on Reunion: Coda

Despite an unusually late start to my writing activities (I opened the Word .docx file to Coda’s rough draft sometime after 2 PM, and “only” wrote until just past 6:30 PM), I did add between 700 and 800 novel words to Chapter 11’s Scene One. I didn’t finish the scene; even though I don’t do outlines, I do have an instinct for knowing when a scene or chapter has an endpoint, and I have not reached that yet. My gut feeling, based on what I know must happen in the scene – which is an expansion of a plot point in Reunion: A Story, which itself is based on something I experienced as a high school senior at South Miami High School in 1983 – the scene is between 50% to 60% complete.

Per Microsoft Word, Chapter 11, Scene One is three pages long (8.5X11) and has a word count – including the chapter title and scene heading – of 1,263 words. I estimate that yesterday I added 900 of those words to the 300-plus that I wrote on July 31.

After my rest break, I will work on the scene some more. If things go well, I should complete it by the end of this fourth workday of the first week of August 2023.

Oh, About Reunion: A Story…

In other writing-related news, yesterday, to my mortification, I found it necessary to send another correction to Kindle Direct Publishing to fix yet another annoying mistake in the existing Reunion novella. It is a minor fix – I had misspelled the name of The Juilliard School as Juliard, not knowing I had misspelled it, and no one called me out on it, either – but I was still annoyed, because:

• Only those readers who bought the e-book edition will get the corrected version for free if they have their Kindle e-readers or apps set to receive automatic updates or if they update their copies manually
• No one who owns any of the previous paperback editions, including the flawed first edition from 2018, will have the corrected version unless they buy another copy – and experience with this constant revisionism of the novella has taught me that it takes between a week and 10 days for updates to show up in the print edition. (Changes to the Kindle edition usually appear between three and seven days after I upload corrections.)

I wish I had caught that mistake long, long ago – as far back as 1998, which is when I wrote the original version of Reunion. It is, perhaps, a tiny mistake that few people noticed – again, no one who has read the story has ever said, “Hey, Alex, you need to fix the name of The Juilliard School, my friend.” – but as a former copy editor, I should have known better.

The funny thing about this is that if I were not writing Reunion: Coda – which is both an expansion of Reunion as well as a direct sequel to it – I never would have caught on to that faux pas.

Oh, well. It’s fixed. And if you own the Kindle edition, you should be able to read the corrected version of Reunion by August 10. Make sure your e-reader or app is set for Automatic Updates for content. Paperback owners…including me…will either have to ignore the misspelled word or buy the updated version. If you choose to go for the latter option, I suggest you wait until August 15 to be sure the updates are fully applied to the book’s file in the KDP servers.

Well, that’s it for this, my 1,208^th post on A Certain Point of View, Too. I must go on my rest break, then get back to work on my novel. So, until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.