On Writing & Storytelling: My ‘Hump Day’ Was a ‘Two-Steps Forward, One Step Back’ Kind of Day

Late Morning/Midday/Early Afternoon, Thursday, September 14, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Greetings, all!

It is another extremely hot early (meteorological) fall day here in the Tampa Bay area. As I begin my 1,260^th post in A Certain Point of View, Too, the temperature (outside) is 87°F/31°C under sunny conditions. With humidity at 58% and the wind blowing from the north-northwest at 3 MPH/6 KMH, the heat index is 93°F/35°C. Today we can expect partly sunny skies and a high of 92°F/33°C.

For me, this is still unpleasant weather because it keeps me from going outside for a stroll, but I also remember that the west coast of Florida, including the Tampa area, has been lucky so far and hurricanes have not made landfall nearby. There’s two named storms in the Atlantic now – Lee and Margot – and the steering currents, combined with the Coriolis effect, have kept them far out at sea.

Margot is too far out in the North Atlantic to be a worry to anyone beyond the Azores Islands, and Lee probably won’t cause too many problems for folks in the New England area. The hurricane, which once was a monstrous Category Five but is now “just” a Category 1, is currently predicted to hit Nova Scotia on Saturday as a tropical storm. It’s hard to say if Lee will have a serious impact on Maine and New Hampshire; I hope it doesn’t.

On Writing & Storytelling: A Little Bit of This (Writing), a Little Bit of That (Editing & Revising)

Yesterday was a reasonably productive day on the writing front, despite the fact that I didn’t write too many “new words” and did not reach the 50,000-word mark. I wrote just enough to nudge Scene Three of Chapter 11 into a “this sounds like we are almost at an endpoint” segment that leads up to a definite cutoff, but unless my instincts are wrong, I still have not finished this scene.

I spent much of the late afternoon editing and revising several scenes in the manuscript, adding a few words here and deleting a lot of words there. Now, according to the word count feature on Microsoft Word, Reunion: Coda has 49,413 words – including, of course, the title page.

I woke up much later than usual, so I am behind on my writing schedule. I usually start writing these blog posts between 9:30 AM and 10:30 AM – depending on my mood and energy levels – but today I began at 11:15 AM, so I’m already “late” as it is. I still need to take a break for lunch and to rest for a while, so I will return to my writing desk between 1:30 PM and 2 PM.

Will I write additional material for Scene Three and finish it today? Will I reach – and surpass – the 50,000-word mark? Or will I concentrate more on making edits and revisions? I don’t know. We’ll see what happens after my midday break.