Musings & Thoughts for Friday, January 12, 2024, or: Reflections on My First Month in New England…and a Progress Report on Reunion: Coda

Late Morning, Friday, January 12, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, folks. It’s just past 10 in the morning here in New England as I begin this, the 1,395^th post in A Certain Point of View, Too. Although it’s cold outside – the temperature is 34°F/1°C, with a feels-like factor of 48°F/9°C, it is a lovely morning in Edelweiss, the part of Madison where I now live. It’s sunny outside, and the forecast for today is super nice: The skies will be mostly sunny, and the high temperature will be 38°F/3°C. Tonight, unfortunately, we’re expecting a slushy mix of rain and snow, and the low will be 22°F/-5°C.

M-Day + One Month

Today marks the one-month anniversary of my departure from Florida. I am, slowly but surely, adjusting to my new home. There’s still much to do until I am set up here; I still have tons of books, Blu-rays, DVDs, and compact discs stored in moving boxes in the garage, and I have yet to go through the process of becoming a New Hampshirite. Since it’s Friday, January 12, I doubt that I’ll be able to vote in the primary – I’m not even sure when it is, but if it’s next week, I can’t vote because I’m not registered yet.

Emotionally, I am doing better than expected considering the circumstances of my departure from the state where I was born and lived for most of my life. Yes, I do get homesick, especially for the “flatness” of the terrain in both Miami-Dade and Hillsborough Counties. And I sometimes dislike the fact that Amazon deliveries here are as slow for rural customers as they used to be until 2015 or so for city dwellers; instead of receiving my orders in two or three days, most packages from Amazon now take 5-7 days. I depend on “Ammy” for a lot of things, including buying non-perishable food items, grooming/hygiene products such as toothpaste, dandruff shampoo, and skin moisturizer, as well as the occasional entertainment materials (such as books, movies, or music albums), so returning to the delivery pace of the 2000s has been…annoying.

On the other hand, I feel more…useful here because I can cook my own meals on an electric stove and do my own laundry. I also feel that even though I don’t own the house where I live, the two rooms I use (one for sleeping, one for writing) are truly my personal space. My section of the house is not adjacent to my housemate Stuart’s bedroom, so I don’t worry if my PC’s Amazon Music app is playing John Williams’ Star Wars theme too loud to bother anyone else, for instance.

As for the all-important “better writing environment” aspect of living in New Hampshire…that’s still something I am having to adjust to. Even though the days are gradually growing longer as the season progresses, the sun still sets before 5 PM this far north[1], and the “early darkness” is less conducive to creative thinking.  

I don’t know if I am susceptible to seasonal affective disorder (SAD) or “winter depression,” but I have noticed that unless I’m already in “the zone” and so into my writing that I don’t stop for anything except maybe go to the “throne room,” my enthusiasm levels drop, and along with them, my productivity also goes “Pfft.”  That’s why I’m trying to blog well before noon now; the earlier that I can start working on the novel, the more I can accomplish before the sun starts dipping under the horizon.

On Writing & Storytelling

Although I can’t say that I have had one of those days here in Madison when I am in “the zone” and I am so into my story that I don’t notice that it’s way past 5 PM and still writing, yesterday was a productive day as far as Reunion: Coda goes.

Yes, I’m still working on that difficult “epistolary chapter” – or, as Friends would call it in their episode title style, “The One with the Emails” – that has proved to be…challenging. I “only” wrote two simulated emails between my narrator/protagonist Jim Garraty (who is in New York City) and his new love, Madison, aka Maddie, a concert pianist with the New York Philharmonic (the “Phil”). Maddie and her fellow musicians are in London recording an album, so the two lovers use email to keep in touch.  

According to the Word Count function on Microsoft Word, those two emails added 1,268 words to the manuscript. There were more than 1,268 words before 8 PM; I may have stopped “writing” shortly after 4 PM yesterday, but since I don’t leave my office before 9 or even 10 PM unless it is time to make and eat dinner, I am constantly fine-tuning what I wrote during the scheduled work hours until I’m satisfied with the result.  Sometimes, this means adding new words or finding better ways to say something. Other times, this means cutting out unnecessary words and clunky passages.

So even though I “only” wrote two emails in a “new thread” between The Big Apple and The Big Smoke, I both added to the novel’s word count (as of this post, I have written 145 pages and 60,433 words – including the title page and the epigraphs.

I’ve been showing my “work in progress” to my friend Juan Carlos Hernandez (the same friend who gave me my first break as a screenwriter a few years ago, and the same talented man who, in his free time, came up with several concepts for Reunion: Coda’s cover art). He says – because, of course, I ask – that when he reads the emails, he can tell the difference between Jim’s “voice” and Maddie’s. He even can tell the difference between dialects: my “I-Guy” speaks with an American accent, even when he writes. Madison – whom I named last March, well before I knew that I’d move to a town with that name – was born in London to British parents and split her childhood between Great Britain and the U.S. after her father’s job took him and his family to South Florida. Naturally, she has a refined Received Pronunciation accent, aka “the Queen’s English” or “BBC English” accent spoken mainly by the high and upper-middle classes in the UK.

I love how I could hear the difference in both Jim’s and Maddie’s voices.

Juan Carlos Hernandez, referring to the emails in Reunion: Coda

Here’s how Juan expressed it, in his own words:

I love how I could hear the difference in both Jim’s and Maddie’s voices. That was impressive.

Like all writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, J.R.R. Tolkien, Harper Lee, D.H. Lawrence, Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts, or Stephen King, I sometimes worry that my writing is shitty and that I am, at best, a hack. I think there’s even a term for this – “Writer’s Depression” – a malady that is compounded when someone claims, point blank, that I’m not a “real” writer.

However, there is a part of me – a substantial one at that – that knows I have at least a modicum of writing talent. I earned As and Bs in my journalism, creative writing, and English comp classes in high school and college, and all of the reviews on Amazon for Reunion: A Story – Book 1 of the Reunion Duology – are either five or four-star reviews. All my writing teachers and satisfied readers can’t be wrong, right?

It’s this part of my writer’s personality – insecure and hesitant as it often might be – that feels reassured when folks like Juan – who is, after all, an actor, comedian, and filmmaker in his own right and has a good ear for language – and my mentors from high school and college tell me that I can write well and that I’m on the right track with the novel.

Anyhoo…yesterday was a good day to write.

Let’s see what today has in store for me on the writing front.

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[1] Sunset today will come at 4:28 PM EST.