Late Morning, Friday, January 5, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 1,387th post in A Certain Point of View, Too.
Today, obviously, is Friday, the first of the new year. It’s a bright, sunny, if perhaps frigid day here in this corner of New England. As I write this at 10:48 AM Eastern Standard Time, the temperature in Madison is 23°F/-5°C under sunny skies, and the feels-like temperature is 25°F/-4°C. Today’s forecast calls for sunny skies and a high of 29°F/-2°C. Tonight, skies are expected to be mostly clear. The low will be 17°F/-8°C.
I got up at what used to be my usual wakeup time back in Lithia: 6:30 AM. I didn’t want to, necessarily, but I had to, you know, go, and when I blearily went back to bed afterward, I couldn’t fall asleep again. So…I followed the same routine I had in Florida, except that I now must, bleary-eyed or not, brew some Maxwell House coffee on my coffeemaker.
Since it’s really, really, really cold in the morning even with the heater running, I can’t function until I have breakfast, which today consisted of a glass of Sunny Delight, two glazed donuts from Dunkin Donuts, two Vitamin D gummies, and two cups of coffee with Dunkin Donuts salted caramel creamer. I thought seriously about making scrambled eggs but decided not to – I wasn’t that hungry.
And, right now I’m sitting at my desk in my office, listening to Romantic Moments with Mozart and thinking of my action plan for this last day of my first workweek in 2024.
Action This Day – Back to the Trenches with Reunion: Coda
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you might recall that back in Florida I established a routine of writing A Certain Point of View, Too posts in the morning, stopping for a midday break (usually one hour to 90 minutes long) to eat lunch and/or rest from staring at a computer monitor and typing on a keyboard, then returning to my desk to work on my novel for at least four hours – even if I didn’t end up writing much during those four hours.
One of the things I learned from reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – although it’s something that most writers know (or should know) – is that setting a work schedule and sticking to it like glue are the best way to approach any writing project. It matters not whether you’re writing a novel, a screenplay, a short story, or – fuck – even a blog post; your chances of completing whatever it is you’re writing improve if you set a goal, keep to your set schedule, and then take time off to live life and rest.
Will I write “fresh copy” today? I don’t know, Dear Reader. I hope I do; I need to finish the “epistolary chapter” – aka “The One with the E-mails” – so I can move on to the next chapter and get the story closer to a climax both figuratively and literally.
Alex Diaz-Granados
Accordingly, as soon as I publish this on WordPress, my plan is to:
- Figure out what to have for lunch
- Read a book for a while (this is something all writers must do anyway. You can’t be a good writer unless you read constantly)
- Rest for a while
- Return to my desk between 1 and 1:30 PM and work for four hours
Keep in mind that “work” on the manuscript does not necessarily mean that I will write new material for four hours straight, with only a few rest breaks factored in. “Work” also entails reading what I’ve written before; I have been working on Reunion: Coda since last March, and even though I’ve already made lots of edits and revisions to the manuscripts, it seems as though the manuscript always needs nips, tucks, and “do-overs.”
Will I write “fresh copy” today? I don’t know, Dear Reader. I hope I do; I need to finish the “epistolary chapter” – aka “The One with the E-mails” – so I can move on to the next chapter and get the story closer to a climax both figuratively and literally. I want to finish Reunion: Coda by late March…early April at the latest, so the sooner I finish Chapter 12 (it’s really Chapter 11, if you don’t count the Prologue), the better the chances are of meeting this deadline. (I’ve already missed two earlier ones, you see.)
Anyway…that’s my action plan for the day. And since it’s almost noon now (I’m not Speedy Gonzales at the keyboard) I will close this post here so I can publish it and go on my midday break.
So, until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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