Musings & Thoughts for Sunday, November 26, 2023, or: Long Weekend Update, Part the Third

Late Morning, Sunday, November 26, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, there, folks.

As I write this, it is a cool, greyish late fall day in the Tampa Bay area. Currently, the temperature outside is 73°F/23°C under cloudy skies. It looks like a cold front has either passed through the area or is in the process of doing so, cos the forecast for today calls for scattered rain showers and a high of 82°F/28°C.

In sharp contrast, up in Madison, New Hampshire, the weather picture is more reflective of the post-Thanksgiving season. The temperature there is 34°F/1°C under sunny conditions. The forecast for the area says folks up there can expect mostly sunny skies and a high of 40°F/5°C.

From Lithia to Madison: The Packing Process Continues

Well, as of today, most of the stuff which marks this room as “mine” has been removed and packed into moving boxes, including my 2017 40^th Anniversary replica of the Star Wars “circus” poster and framed my William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Trilogy poster. All of my Star Wars, Star Trek, and Indiana Jones books, movies, and collectibles are gone, as are most of my clothes, hats, and even the few family pictures I had on my IKEA Billy shelves.  

I still have my small 4K UHD TV with its compatible Blu-ray player on its shelf, and – obviously – my desk, my office chair, and my computer are still here. My now-empty media towers and floating shelves are till here, as well – a bittersweet reminder that this house was home to me for seven years…and that sometimes life takes twists and turns that are as unwelcome as they are unexpected.

Again, I can’t exactly say that I’m either depressed or overjoyed now. I agreed to move out last November, thinking that I was going to be “rehomed” somewhere not that far away from here. Alas, as I said yesterday, minds were changed – not on my end – about that house in Brandon, so since then I’ve been scrambling to find an alternative destination. Florida, unfortunately, is not exactly the best destination for someone with limited financial resources to find affordable housing, so I accepted the offer to rent a couple of rooms up in Madison, even though it means moving to a state where winter is…well, winter.

I’m trying to be optimistic and embrace the adventure aspects of moving to a state where there are four seasons and – so I’ve been told – a better environment for writing and being creative. Still, I’m apprehensive about the move…as I’m sure most people would be when they’ve only lived in a few places for the majority of their lives. (Plus, I’m moving in early winter, which is something I’ve never done before.)

On Writing & Storytelling

I did manage to squeeze in a little time into the hectic schedule of prepping for the move to do some minor edits and revisions to Reunion: Coda. I went through the novel’s prologue and first couple of chapters and found a few errors that needed to be fixed. Some were typos or minor formatting mistakes, while others were small but irritating inconsistencies in either style or continuity.

Reunion: A Story – the novella that Reunion: Coda is a continuation of – had plenty of mistakes, most of them caused by my haste to self-publish the first edition back in 2018. I spent a considerable amount of time between March and late September of this year fixing those, and now I’m 95% satisfied with the first book of the novella.

That being said, I’d like to avoid a repeat of this situation with Reunion: Coda, so my plan is to use the 15 or so days I have before M-Day to get as many revisions as possible done to the manuscript before I leave Florida. Of course, this means that my original plan to release the novel – my first! – for the 2023 holiday season is now scrapped; there’s no way I can write the book’s remaining chapters before December 12, no matter how much I wanted to. But as long as I have my computer up and running – and a room to write in – I’ll check the manuscript for mistakes and fix as many of those as possible.

Anyway, that’s all the news that I have for you today, so I’ll close this post here. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.