Musings & Thoughts for Monday, January 22, 2024, or: Weekend’s Over – Let’s Get Back to Work

Late Morning, Monday, January 22, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone. It’s Monday morning here in my corner of New Hampshire. As I begin this, my 1,405^th post in A Certain Point of View, Too, the temperature outside is 25°F (-4°C) under mostly cloudy conditions. With the wind blowing from the west-southwest at 1 MPH (1 KMH) and humidity at 60%, the feels-like temperature is 36°F (2°C). The forecast for today calls for partly sunny skies and a high of 35°F (1°C). Tonight, the skies will be mostly cloudy. The low will be 25°F (-4°C)

Weekend Update, Part the Third

Yesterday was, essentially, a quiet and uneventful Sunday in rural New England. I wrote my daily blog post, had a light lunch, and listened to the digital version of the Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack (a nice recording which is better than the 1981 cassette version but not as good as the one I have – somewhere – on compact disc). I also killed lots of time on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly known as Twitter), and went out for my “daily dose of sun and fresh air” walk.

“Cry ‘havoc!’ And Let Slip the Dogs of War!”

Yesterday afternoon I,  for the first time since I arrived in Madison on December 15, played two complete sessions of Regiments during the evening hours. Once again, I chose to command a force from the 1^st Brigade of the U.S. 3^rd Armored Division, teamed with a similarly sized NATO force controlled by the game’s AI.

The first time around, the Allied unit led by the computer was a British mechanized infantry regiment (or parts of one; despite its name, Regiments only lets players command a maximum of four “task forces” and not an entire regiment or brigade). The Skirmish was an Attack scenario set in Grasleben; it had a time limit of 30 minutes, and it was a Sunset battle.

The NATO force won – I captured all eight of the Objective Zones – but it was a pyrrhic victory. My unit had two company-sized task forces equipped with main battle tanks (M1A1 and M1IP Abrams) and was equipped with M2/M3 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles/cavalry fighting vehicles, but this British unit only had support from light tanks, and their armored personnel carriers were basically “battle taxis” with light armor and no heavy anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) of their own. Thus, even though “my” American forces also suffered heavy casualties – especially helicopters – the Brits got their noses bloodied by the combined Soviet-Polish defenders of the Grasleben area.

The second Skirmish – same battle area, same Attack scenario, different weather and Allied force – went better. Again, I captured all eight OZs, but this time the other NATO force was the U.S. 11^th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Its task forces were configured differently from those under my command, but they included various models of M1 Abrams tanks and both the AH-1F Cobra and AH-64A Apache attack helicopters. So, this time around NATO won a more resounding victory against the Red force – and my casualties were far lower.

I finished the night by going to bed after 10 PM and attempting to watch The First World War’s third episode, Global War. This time around I managed to watch the entire episode before falling asleep. Just barely, though. The combination of the late start, the warmth from the space heater I reluctantly use at night, and the narrator’s calm, soothing, and British voice made me incredibly drowsy, and I slept soundly till 6:30 AM.  

On Writing & Storytelling: Action This Day – The Epistolary Chapter Must Go On…and On….

Today, of course, is Monday, which marks the beginning of another workweek…and the resumption of work on Reunion: Coda.

This, of course, means that I’ll be working – yet again – on Chapter 12, aka “the epistolary chapter,” aka “The One with the Emails.”  I’ve been pounding away at this seemingly “easy” part of the novel since mid-October, and I’m still only between 66% and 75% of the way through it.

 I think part of the reason why this has been the hardest chapter to write is the format I chose; like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or, more relevantly, Matt Beaumont’s e: A Novel,The Big Smoke and the Big Apple: An Epistolary Chapter of Love and Music – March 2000 eschews a conventional narrative style. Instead, it tells, through an exchange of emails, the story of my narrator/protagonist Jim Garraty’s blossoming romantic relationship with Madison “Maddie” Reynaud, a concert pianist with the New York Philharmonic who he met – seemingly by chance – at a nightclub in Brooklyn and is now “across the Pond” in her hometown of London, recording an album with her fellow “Phil” members at Abbey Road Studios.

I’ve done some bits of epistolary storytelling before, most notably in Reunion: A Story, the novella that is now the first half of the Reunion Duology, but never to the degree of complexity (or volume of correspondence) that I’m attempting to do in Reunion: Coda. Thinking – and writing – in the distinctive voices of not one but two characters is hard enough to do when you do it in straightforward narrative form; it’s even more difficult to do when you do it in email format, even when you simplify the “look” of the emails and don’t try to make the emails look like real ones.

Another reason – the biggest, I think – that it’s taking me so long to complete “The One with the Emails” is (as I’ve suggested in past discussions of this novel) that I was just getting started on it when I had to shift my energies (both mental and physical) from writing a novel in Florida to moving to “Echo Base” here in Madison. I had been in “moving out of the house” mode since late 2022, at least mentally, but because the original plan had focused on finding me housing either in Tampa (which is where I lived until December) or Miami (my hometown and city of residence until 2016), the Big Move was on hold because affordable rents in the Sunshine State are almost impossible to find unless you make a lot of money and can find a suitable house or apartment.

But once I found out that the New Hampshire option was available – I believe it was in mid-October – everything changed, and my plans of finishing Reunion: Coda before the winter holiday season were scrapped. (They were, at best, highly optimistic anyway. Judging by my current writing pace of one email per day, it would have taken a miracle to complete the novel in time for a mid-December release.) Stress, lack of sleep,  plus having to stop work on the chapter for more than a month before, during, and after the Big Move North, all played a huge role in slowing the creative process.

So, not surprisingly, today the only item on my writer’s agenda is to continue to plug away at the epistolary chapter. I’m trying to find a way to get to the “finish line” of The One with the Emails in an organic, logical, and creative way that will be both satisfying and well-paced without seeming like I was in a rush to end it and move on to the next chapter. I’m also planting the seeds for events for the next stage in Jim and Maddie’s love affair that will add dramatic tension to an otherwise “fluffy” romantic novel before I can give my two leads (and hopefully my readers) a well-written – and rewarding – conclusion.

I do need to take some time to go outside despite the wintry chill, eat lunch, and rest before I tackle the manuscript – which currently has 156 pages (including the title page( and 64,136 words – so I’ll take my leave of you here. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.