On Writing & Storytelling: The Weekend is Upon Us; Now My Question is: To Write…or Not to Write?

Late Morning/Midday/Early Afternoon, Saturday, September 16, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, everyone.

It’s another hot, humid, and potentially rainy day in the Tampa Bay area. As I write this, the temperature outside is 86°F/30°C under sunny skies. However, with a “barely there” breeze blowing from the east-northeast at 5 MPH/8 KMH and humidity at a sticky 73%, the feels-like temperature is 98°F/37°C. The forecast for today calls for mostly cloudy skies, a 22% chance of rain, and a high of 90°F/32°C.

Luckily, in this hyperactive Atlantic hurricane season of 2023, there are no tropical systems headed this way. There are three of those out over the North Atlantic: Hurricane Lee, Tropical Storm Margot, and Tropical Depression #15, which will be named Nigel once its sustained winds reach the 39 MPH threshold. Lee currently is off the coast of New England but it is not expected to hit the U.S. directly; the storm’s projected track will take its eye onto Nova Scotia later today.

That’s not to say that Lee won’t affect the weather in the Northeast; Lee’s outer bands are spinning over many states in the region, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Having gone through various tropical “events” down here in Florida, residents in those states are not having a nice Saturday with all the rain and wind from Lee’s outer bands. But at least they won’t get the more destructive part of the storm – the eyewall.

The Writer’s Weekend Dilemma: To Work or Not to Work?

Now that the weekend is upon us, I am once again faced with the question that always seems to pop up whenever my workweek has had more “off days” than productive days, especially where moving the story of Reunion: Coda forward is concerned: Do I work today to make up for those days (especially yesterday) when I didn’t add enough words to make feel like I accomplished anything? Or do I take Saturday and Sunday off and resume working on the novel on Monday?

Most of me, especially the Serious Writer part of my personality, wants to work, at least for a couple of hours, on the manuscript. Partly, of course, because every day that I don’t work on Reunion: Coda delaysthe novel’s pre-Winter Holiday season release by another 24 hours. When I began working on this project six months ago, I thought, naively, that the first draft would be finished by July and that the revised draft would be ready to be uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing by…well…now.

Unfortunately, I was too optimistic when I believed that Reunion: Coda would somehow be ready for readers to purchase and read by the fall season. I’ve had to spend a lot of time fixing issues with Reunion: A Story – the first book in the Reunion Duology – to address some grammar and spelling errors that crept in when I wrote that novella. I also adjusted a few minor details so that the timelines in both books are consistent and also match up with the times in which they are set.

And, of course, I have a lot on my mind about various aspects of my life outside of the world of writing and storytelling, so I’m not always able to focus on Reunion: Coda the way that I ought to.

Anyway, since I have been telling myself on the “low productivity” days that “Oh, well, I can always work on the novel on Saturday to make up for not writing enough today,” I feel an obligation to write at least a few hundred words at some point today and tomorrow.

It’s a bit past noon now, which means that if I am to assuage my worries about my writing journey and work for a while on Reunion: Coda, I’d best go on my midday break and re-energize so I can write those 585 words I need to reach the 50,000-word mark and feel like I am making progress…any kind of progress.