Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, January 16, 2024, or: Writing Reunion: Coda’s Epistolary Chapter…One Simulated Email At a Time

Late Morning, Tuesday, January 16, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, folks.

It’s late morning – 9:10 AM Eastern Standard Time – here in my corner of New Hampshire as I start this, the 1,399^th post in A Certain Point of View, Too. It’s a gray, oft-snowy winter morning; the temperature outside is 20°F/-7°C under cloudy skies. The “feels like”  is 25°F/-4°C. The forecast for the rest of the day calls for snow to fall throughout the daylight hours; the high will be 23°F/-5°C. Tonight, we can expect light snow showers throughout the night. The low will be 11°F/-12°C.

Ah, well. I knew that snow and below-freezing temperatures were going to be a part of my daily life in winter when I accepted my friend Patti’s offer to rent two rooms in what was once her parents’ house here in New England. So…I’m not griping (much) I’m just recording the weather conditions here for posterity.

(And, okay. I will admit this much. I was hoping that we’d get a break from constant snowfall because I wanted to put on my snow boots – yes, I have a pair of those – and my winter jacket with a matching hat so I could go outside and get my daily dose of sunshine. Well, that’s not happening. Item #150 on my Gripe List, I suppose.)

On Writing & Storytelling: An Update on the (Infamous) Epistolary Chapter of Reunion: Coda

After my midday break – around 1:30 PM, I reckon – on a snow-free Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I resumed work on Reunion: Coda’s 12^th chapter – the epistolary part of the novel in which my two leads, history professor Jim and concert pianist Maddie, are separated by 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean because she’s in her hometown of London, recording an album at Abbey Road Studios with the New York Philharmonic.

When I started working on the epistolary chapter – or, as Friends would have titled it, “The One with the Emails” – in Florida back in October, I was making better progress than I am now. I wrote a batch of six emails in one day. And even after I knew I was going to move to New Hampshire in wintertime (but before I started packing up my things), I was still batting out at least a few complete exchanges between Jim in New York and Maddie in London per writing session.

Here, because I’m distracted by both the weather and the protracted process of getting me “settled in,” I’m writing one simulated email per day. That’s a hell of a lot better than not writing anything at all between November 17, 2023, and early January, but I need to get to a point in which I can at least pick up the pace and write two emails per workday.

Anyway, yesterday I – as is my practice – read over what I’ve written so far, found and fixed some bloopers (some of them were minor and hard to spot, even with spellcheck, while other were more serious errors of commission rather than plain ol’ typos), and did some fine-tuning in parts that were good but still needed some improvement.

When I finished editing and revising what was already in my Word file, I then proceeded to create an email from Maddie in response to Jim’s last message:

It reads, in part:

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: New Topic – Your Big Day (and Other Matters):

My dearest Jim,

Good morning, honey. I woke up not too long ago, and the first thing I did – well, the second thing; the first thing I did was to turn off the alarm on my watch (for such a smallish gadget, it sure makes a lot of noise!) – was to turn on my laptop, go to my Hotmail account, and check to see if you had emailed. And, sure enough, you had. I never should have doubted you would!

(There’s a lot more in that email, but I’m afraid that Maddie’s reply to Jim has more than a few spoilers, so that’s all you’re getting from me about this part of the epistolary chapter.)

In brief: I’m making progress on Reunion: Coda. Just not as much of it as I would like.

Action This Day

Today, of course, is a working day for me, so after my regular midday lunch/rest break, I will be back at my desk to work on Reunion: Coda. Of course, because I want to finish the novel by April or May, I would love to write two or three new emails to move the epistolary chapter closer to its conclusion and – finally – begin the novel’s thirteenth chapter. I don’t do outlines or much advance planning when I write fiction, so I don’t know exactly how many more emails I need to get to the end of the chapter – I figure that it might take three or four days (within the story’s universe, not in the one I live in) for Maddie and the New York “Phil” to record the album at Abbey Road, and we’re only on Day Two of the recording sessions…..

Do I regret choosing to tell this particular bit of Reunion: Coda in a different style than the straightforward first-person narrative voice? Sometimes yes, but I think that in the end, my decision to show the evolution of Jim and Maddie’s relationship through “their own words” in private communications serves the story well and helps me become a better writer. Of course, I sometimes get frustrated with how slowly this chapter is coming along; as I said yesterday about the settling-in process, patience is not (and has never been) my strong suit, so I do chide myself (constantly) for trying a new-to-me storytelling technique.

I don’t have anything else to add, except to ask you to wish me luck on my novel-writing journey.

And, on that note, I wish you all a good day! Ciao for now.