Musings & Thoughts for Monday, January 8, 2024, or: If It’s Monday, It Must Be ‘Writing Day’

Late Morning, Monday, January 8, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.”― Carl Reiner

Hi, everyone. Well, it’s the start of the second workweek of the still-young 2024, and here in Madison, it is a wintry, snow-covered morning. It snowed for much of the day yesterday, so now there’s a blanket of the cold, wet white stuff all over the ground outside.

“The snow began to fall again, drifting against the windows, politely begging entrance and then falling with disappointment to the ground”― Jamie McGuire, Beautiful Disaster

As I write this – it’s 10:34 AM Eastern Standard Time – the temperature outside is 26°F/-3°C under sunny skies, although my Weather app informs me that the feels-like temperature is 36°F/2°C. The forecast for today calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 31°F/-1°C. Tonight, we can expect mostly clear skies and a low of 7°F/-14°C.

I don’t have much to say about my Sunday night. I ate a modest supper around 5 PM, which was followed two hours later by a cup of hot Market Basket cocoa (into which I dropped a peppermint candy cane). After that, I puttered about on social media, edited some of my late December/early January blog posts, and ended up watching half of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug on my PC’s Movies Anywhere app since, thanks to my loss – temporary, I hope, but vexing – of the remote for my one working Samsung 4K UHD Blu-ray player,[1] I can’t use the TV in my bedroom at all.

I only watched half of The Desolation of Smaug because I started the movie around 10 PM. It was, naturally, cold in the house even though the heater was on, and the combination of low temperatures, long movie, and having had a tough time sleeping the previous night made me drowsy. And, to be honest, as much as I like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I’m less enamored of his The Hobbit trilogy of prequels.

I don’t dislike the newer Middle Earth-set films. I do think the story could have been distilled to what is in J.R.R. Tolkien’s original book and told in, at most, a duology instead of a trilogy. I’ve owned The Hobbit three-film series since before my mom died in 2015, but I’ve only watched all three movies once, and that was back in 2017. They’re technically well-done, and they do feel tonally consistent with The Lord of the Rings, but I rarely feel the need to watch An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, or The Battle of Five Armies.

I think I went to bed around midnight, and except for one unwelcome wakeup to go to the loo in the wee hours of the morning, I slept for slightly over eight hours.

On Writing & Storytelling: Action This Day

Today is, of course, a working day for me. I am trying my best to stick to the routine I established last March in Florida to write Reunion: Coda – blog in the morning, rest a couple of hours at lunchtime, then work on the manuscript for several hours (ideally four hours, but my mileage varies with my mood and, of course, environmental factors), then go “live life,” such as it is. It’s a good plan, actually, and when I can follow it “to the letter” it often rewards me with good results, both in productivity and quality of my writing.

I need to keep working on the epistolary chapter – “The One with the Emails” – so I can wrap up the twelfth chapter and get closer to the story’s conclusion. I’ve been working on Reunion: Coda for nearly a year, and even though I enjoy the writing process, mostly, I do want to finish it so I can publish it and, then, start writing something else.

However, having learned from my experience with Reunion: A Story, I don’t want to rush through the writing/editing process this time around. I wrote the first installment of the Reunion Duology in a feverish three-day period back in 1998; that resulted in an exceptionally good first draft, but even though I edited it a few times between then and July of 2018 – which is when I self-published Reunion’s first edition – the novella was full of typos, spelling errors, and even erroneous calendar dates – an unforgivable sin for a writer who is crafting a fictional story set in real places and actual calendar dates.

I don’t want to have to constantly revise Reunion: Coda once I publish it sometime this year, so even though I’m aiming for a Spring 2024 release, I will take every step necessary – short of hiring an editor, which I can’t afford to do – to improve the manuscript during the production stage and make sure that the novel lives up to Reunion fans’ expectations.

(Yes. Even though it’s not a bestseller in the same category as, say, works by Stephen King, Daniele Steel, or Nicholas Sparks, Reunion indeed has a following. Several readers who have reviewed the novella have said it left them wanting some more, and one reader in Great Britain wrote in her Amazon review, “The book basically makes the point that it is better to be sorry for sins of commission, rather than regret sins of omission, yet it also shows how the angst of high school and teen fears get in the way of true love. One point I would make – I would LOVE to see a sequel to this, written from Marty’s point of view. PLEASE?”)

Anyhoo…

It’s just past noon now, which means I need to close this post and publish it so I can go on my midday break and get on with my Action Plan for this sunny but chilly Monday.

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[1] I will, eventually, buy a second player for the TV in my office. I do have an older Blu-ray player, but it won’t support 4K UHD discs.