Musings & Thoughts for Monday, August 7, 2023, or: Weekend Update, Part the Third (and… Some Remarks About My Writing for the Day)

Late Morning, Monday, August 7, 2023, Lithia

Hi, everyone. Well, here I am, still bleary-eyed, sleepy, and unusually tired on another simmering midsummer day in the Tampa Bay area. And, of course, it’s Monday, which means that after taking it easy for the entire weekend – at least as far as working on Reunion: Coda is concerned – it’s back to my regular routine of writing, revising, and editing.

Weekend Update, Part the Third

To my surprise, I managed to resist the temptation to work extensively on the manuscript for the novel on both Saturday and Sunday.

That’s not to say I didn’t work on it at all; I did open the Word file for the rough draft and made a tiny edit in the section I finished writing on Friday. But I didn’t have a yen to add all-new material and begin writing Scene Two in Reunion: Coda’s eleventh chapter, partly because I didn’t have any ideas in my head, but mostly because I realized I need to rest on weekends. So, I only made that one tiny fix (changed “Anne Saroyan” to “Ann Saroyan”) and then closed the file.

Overall, Sunday, August 6 was a repeat of Saturday the 5^th; I was online most of the day – playing a football-based game on Facebook, exchanging posts on X (the company formerly known as Twitter), exchanging emails with my friend and filmmaking partner Juan Carlos Hernandez about a promotional video he is going to make for Reunion: A Story (the first book in the Reunion Duology), and wrote another blog post for the original Blogger version of A Certain Point of View.

I didn’t play any of my Steam games, but I did listen to music – mostly on YouTube, but also on my Amazon Music app – and read a little more from David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.

To cap off my Sunday – which, like all of my weekends as of late was neither great nor terrible, just a middling, unsatisfactory meh – I watched director Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) from start to finish, but with the audio commentary track on. If there’s one thing I love about DVDs and Blu-rays, it’s being able to get insights about how movies are made straight from the creative team. Sure, sometimes – as in the case of Casablanca – it is nice to listen to the perspective of a film critic like the late Roger Ebert about older films from the 1930s and ‘40s (the oldest film I own is 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood). But for more recent films, especially the ones I watched when I was younger or “franchise movies” such as the Star Trek and Star Wars series, I love listening to the cast and crew commentaries.

I finished watching The Last Jedi around midnight, but I wasn’t sleepy when I went back to my room, so I watched The River Styx, the third part of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 10-part documentary The Vietnam War. Since it was incredibly late, I had to watch it with the volume turned almost all the way down and with the subtitles on. That, and the lateness of the hour, made me sleepy, although I think – judging from what I remember seeing – I must have gone under around 1 AM. (I woke up a bit after 7:30 AM, but I still feel drowsy and not at my best right now.)

Action This Day

I have yet to take my daily rest break – and boy, do I need it today! – and eat something for lunch, so I have no idea whether today will be a “Write New Scene Day” or an “Edit & Revise Existing Material Day.” If I am feeling better and more refreshed after I shower, get dressed, and rest for a while, I will start working on Chapter 11, Scene Two. If I’m still “dragging ass” as I am now, well…I’ll still work. Editing and revising stuff is also part of the writing journey. Indeed, it’s the most important part of writing anything, be it a novel, a screenplay, or even a “measly” blog post like this one.

My preference, all things being equal, is to write all-new material. I have fun doing that, which is one of the reasons why I allowed myself to embark on this “first novel” adventure. I like the story I’m telling and the characters that populate it, and it’s something that I have – quite unintentionally – been working on since I was 24 years old and still in college back in my home in South Florida. And, as I’ve said so many times since I began writing Reunion: Coda in March, I fervently wish to complete this novel in time for a late fall/early December publication date.

But…if I’m tired, it’s hard to feel at the top of my game, and instead of flowing like honey from my unconscious to my typing fingers, plot points, lines of dialogue, and concrete details stay firmly planted in the recesses of my mind and getting them on the page is like pulling teeth!

Editing and revising also require high levels of stamina and alertness, but I can do those things even if my energy levels are at 60% of those I need in order to come up with all-new stuff. I was a copy editor for my college campus’ student newspaper – allegedly one of the best, according to my journalism prof at Miami-Dade College – and I still have that skill set. Making edits and rewriting existing stuff is not child’s play, but to me it’s easier than sitting in a room while listening to music and asking myself, “Okay, so what happens next?”

I don’t know what, exactly, will happen after the rest break, other than the fact that I will work on Reunion: Coda today. We’ll see what develops.