Musings & Thoughts for Thursday, December 28, 2023, or: Notes on a Rainy Day in New England

Late Morning, Thursday, December 28, 2023, Madison, New Hampshire

“Let it rain on some days,

Let yourself shiver on some cold nights,

So when it’s Spring you’ll know why it was all worth going through.” ― Sanhita Baruah

Hi, there, folks.

Well, here we are, three days after Christmas, three days before New Year’s Eve, and 16 days after I left the place I called “home” for slightly over seven years. It’s a gray, chilly, and rainy morning – the temperature outside is 40°F/4°C under light rain. The forecast for the Conway/Madison area calls for rain throughout the day. Tonight, we can expect scattered showers. The high will be 40°F/5°C. The low tonight will be 37°F/3°C. 

So…it looks like I won’t be stepping outside to get any sunshine to ward off the effects of the long winter nights here.

A Quick Writing Life Update

Since I’m still in the middle of a long, complicated, and sometimes baffling settling-in process after an interstate move, I haven’t resumed work on my novel, Reunion: Coda. I have so many other things on my mind right now that I’m in what I call “survival mode,” and the combination of cold, wintry weather and homesickness for Florida is adding to that mental turmoil, so I’m focusing on fixing mistakes in Reunion (the novella that turned out to be the first book of the Reunion Duology) and marketing that instead.

On Tuesday morning, I uploaded what I hope will be the last “fix” to issues with Reunion; they went “live” a few hours later, but Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing arm says that updates to previously existing books can take up to 72 hours before they show up in the eBook edition and a bit close to a week before printed copies can be made with the corrected text included. Thus far, I’ve checked the three ways I have to access the eBook (my new Fire HD 10 tablet, my Kindle for PC app, and the browser version of Kindle on Amazon; as of today, the only Kindle version that shows the corrected text is the browser-based one.

(Sigh)

Oh, well. I’ve been through this before, and the edit will appear where it’s supposed to – eventually.

As far as promoting Reunion: A Story goes, yesterday I started adding quotes from the novella to the book’s page on Amazon-owned Goodreads. So far I’ve picked five quotes from Reunion – one from the 1998 “Present Day” setting, the rest from the June 1983 one – that hopefully will evoke the emotional subtext of my story and, maybe, just maybe, convince people to buy a copy or two.

Meanwhile….

As for other aspects of my new life in Madison, there’s not much to tell. I try to keep my writing skills sharp with these daily posts…I try not to dwell on the negative aspects of the move…and I try to be appreciative of the kindness shown to me by my friends to help me cope with the challenges of adapting to the colder climate in New Hampshire. If I get bored, I play games on my PC, listen to my digital albums on Amazon Music – my CDs are still in boxes, as are my books and most of my movies and TV shows on physical media – or read eBooks on my Fire HD 10, (I’m still pissed that I lost my smaller but still functioning Fire HD 8 tablet between New York state and New Hampshire, by the way.)

Last night I watched The River Styx (December 1963-November 1965), the third episode of The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick. I had started to watch the behind-the-scenes extras of my new Stand By Me 2-disc set (a steelbook release, at that), but Sony Home Entertainment neglected to add English subtitles to those, I could have watched them with Spanish subtitles since I am bilingual, but that always gets annoying for some reason, so I stopped the disc and switched discs from the 1986 Rob Reiner movie to the 2017 PBS documentary.

I don’t know what I’m going to do today other than do more of what I did yesterday. Since the weather outside isn’t conducive to even stepping out onto the front porch to get some fresh air and sunshine, I won’t be attempting to walk out on the driveway. I’ll probably cherry-pick a few more quotes from Reunion and share them on Goodreads, then…keep myself entertained till it’s time to figure out dinner and watch a movie till I get sleepy, I guess.

And on this note, I will close this post. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, stay warm, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things – once the sun comes out, that is.