Musings & Thoughts for Monday, August 14, 2023, or: Weekend Update, Part the Third – and My Writing Plan for Today

Late Morning, Monday, August 14, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, everyone. It’s yet another simmering midsummer day here in the Tampa Bay area. According to my computer’s Weather app, the temperature outside is 87°F/31°C under sunny conditions. With humidity at a sticky 70% and a south-southeasterly breeze blowing at 6 MPH/10 KMH, the heat index is 97°F/38°C – and noon, as I write this, is still two hours away.

Of course, as the day progresses, the temperature will rise, although since we are “only” under a Heat Advisory and not an Excessive Heat Advisory, it’s probably not going to be as bad as it was yesterday. The forecast for this first day of the business week calls for thunderstorms to pass through our area. The high is expected to reach 95°F/34°C. That’s a bit cooler than yesterday’s high, and it’s somewhat of a return to the normal Florida summer pattern of hot mornings and stormy afternoons. Still not my favorite weather pattern, though.

Weekend Update, Part the Third

As was the case with Saturday, my Sunday was fair-to-middling. It wasn’t a particularly great day – except for the burst of joy I got when someone (a perfect stranger I had just started to follow on X/Twitter) told me she’d bought a copy of Reunion: A Story for her Kindle edition – and it wasn’t a particularly dismal day, either.

I spent most of my Sunday afternoon and early evening online, exchanging opinions and jokes with various friends and acquaintances on X, Facebook, and email, fixing one last typo in Reunion (not a major one, but still annoying), and listening to classical music on my Amazon Music app. Later, after I had dinner, I watched This is What We Do, the fifth episode of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s magnificent 10-part documentary, The Vietnam War. I watched the whole episode without falling asleep – a miracle, considering I started watching it after 9 PM.

That’s it. That was my Sunday. It was too hot to go out for a walk, of course, so I stayed in the house. And as I said earlier, we were under an excessive heat advisory anyway, so walking would have been a terrible idea had I persisted in doing that.

Action This Day

This is the start of the working week, which means that I will take a break soon, then return to the task of working on Reunion: Coda. As of right now, I don’t know if I’ll write all-new material or look over what I’ve written so far and do some editing. I’m still, even this late in the morning, a bit foggy-brained even after having breakfast and being awake for three and a half hours. I’m hoping that after my mandatory rest period, I will be able to start Scene Two, or at least come up with an idea for Scene Two, in the eleventh chapter of the novel.

The one factor I have no idea about is the weather and how it will affect my writing. Often, we will get a forecast that calls for thunderstorms to pass through the area in the afternoon. Conditions are ripe for thunderstorm development, especially the high temperatures and humidity levels. But Hillsborough County is a huge geographic area, so it’s quite possible that boomers might pass over Tampa but not over Lithia, and vice versa. If storm cells do develop and affect our neighborhood, I can always use one of my two laptops and work on it using the battery. The .docx file will be saved in the cloud via my Microsoft account, so it doesn’t matter which PC I use when I write.

In all honesty, though, the biggest obstacle to my creative endeavors is my well-being. If I’m rested and in a “can do” mood, I will, at the very least, come up with a good idea for the second scene in Chapter 11. At best, I’ll start the scene and build a foundation for a productive writing day tomorrow.