Musings & Thoughts for Thursday, February 8, 2024, or: A Quick Life Update, and a Not-So-Quick SITREP on ‘The Novel-in-Progress’

Late Morning, Thursday, February 8, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, all!

It’s a nice, sunny New Hampshire morning on this fourth day of the workweek. Currently, we’re in a warming trend; the temperature in Madison is 39°F (4°C) under mostly sunny conditions. With the wind blowing – barely – at 1 MPH (1 Km/H) and humidity at 61%, the feels-like temperature is 57°F (14°C). That’s still cold for this transplant from Florida, but it’s not too bad. The forecast for today calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 45°F (7°C). Tonight, the skies will be mostly clear. The low will be 21°F (-6°C).

Life Goes On

My Wednesday (“Hump Day”) went well, as far as my life here in New England goes. After I posted yesterday’s blog entry, I made “breakfast for lunch” (scrambled eggs, two unheated blueberry Pop Tarts, and a cup of hot cocoa), went outside for a walk and ventured away from the confines of my house’s property line – and past those of Marc and Patti’s house, for that matter. I used hiking poles to help me negotiate the sloping terrain, but otherwise it was like taking a brief walk to the corner of my former block in the Tampa Bay area and back. I didn’t wear gloves on that jaunt, but later, when I took a rare second walk during my “novel-writing shift” (around 3:30 PM, I think), it was chilly enough for me to duck back inside the house, go to my office, and put on my “New York gloves.”[1]

Not long after I finished washing my dish and mug before returning to my office to work on Reunion: Coda, UPS delivered my package with the two AITEE DVD/CD Storage Boxes I purchased on Amazon to organize the physical media portion of my DVD/Blu-ray collection. I had hoped – but not counted on – the package to arrive during the daylight hours so I could at least separate some of my Blu-rays (the “wheat”) from the DVDs (the “chaff”) in my media towers.

Right now, my collection is a mishmash of formats, studios, and even movie series; that’s mostly because when we were packing the movies and TV shows I own on disc, I didn’t want to be meticulously organized and put them in the boxes in the order that they were in the IKEA media towers in my former home in Tampa. (I also didn’t make a list of each box’s contents…I don’t own a printer, and my hand cramps up if I have to write something in longhand.) That’s 100% on me, so if I’m frustrated that DVDs are now in shelves where Blu-rays ought to be, it’s my fault.

Anyway, I don’t plan to store the Blu-rays in the two acrylic AITEE DVD/CD boxes permanently. I just need the containers to hold the Blus (or BDs) while I remove DVDs from the “Blu-ray” sections and rehome them where they ought to be. (Of course, this is still problematic because (a) the IKEA media towers are still incomplete, and many DVDs – including the ones from the Star Wars Prequel and Original trilogies – are in boxes tucked away in the garage. But the new storage boxes will at least keep the BDs I removed from the “DVD-only” tower last night from being scattered hither and yon.

On Writing & Storytelling: Still Editing and Revising

As for Reunion: Coda?

While it is true that Chapter 13, Scene Four’s first draft is complete, as of last night it was still mostly a rough draft, albeit one with good, solid scenes that work well – for the most part.  My Beta Reader, Denise, looked it over yesterday after I finished working on the previous day’s suggestions for edits and revisions. She noted the writing in Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios  was good and the story was solid and fun to read. But she also – rightly – pointed out that some sections of the chapter were repetitious or could be reworded better. (She added a caveat, saying that her comments were “suggestions” that I was free to ignore.)

While it is true that as the author of Reunion: Coda I can take or leave my Beta Reader’s advice – and in a few instances I have considered her suggestions but went with my gut – I saw the logic behind Denise’s editorial recommendations, so today I’ll spend much of my “novel-writing” time making the necessary rewrites – especially ones in sections which need more dialogue or are too repetitive or redundant.

As for the status of the manuscript, here are the latest statistics as they stand before I start working on Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios in a couple of hours.

According to the Word Count function of Microsoft Word, Reunion Coda is 177 pages long (including the title page and the epigrams page) and has a word count of 74,111 words.  

This is the longest writing project I’ve written, ever. It’s also the one that I’ve spent the most time working on; I started Reunion: Coda in mid-March of last year, and even with a temporary hiatus while I moved from Florida to New Hampshire that lasted from mid-November to early January (I couldn’t focus on the novel whilst packing and stressing over the move…and the initial bout of climate shock and homesickness didn’t help, either), I’ve worked on Reunion: Coda for almost 11 months.

In 1998, when I wrote Reunion: A Story, the novella that precedes Reunion: Coda, it only took me three days from the first scene to the conclusion. Mind you, I had an old creative writing assignment from my college days as a starting point, and I worked on it from dawn to dusk, only pausing – to my mom’s dismay – for meals and bathroom breaks.

Back then, I wasn’t planning to share Reunion with a wide audience beyond my mom, my older half-sister (we weren’t getting along well then, but we weren’t yet estranged), and a few chosen friends in Miami. Naturally, I didn’t have a more structured working schedule like I do now, nor was I particularly keen on making edits or revisions. I was satisfied with the story (I thought of it as a “short story” rather than a novella back then, a misconception reflected in its current title[2]), and since it was, in my mind, just a first attempt to write an original work of fiction, I didn’t see the point of working on it except to get rid of typos and misspellings.

That’s not the case with Reunion: Coda. I went into this project with the intention of writing (and publishing) my first novel while at the same time giving some of the novella’s modest number of fans something they asked for – a continuation of Jim and Marty’s story. Thus, I needed to change my work habits and approach the writing process with a more serious and professional attitude.

It hasn’t been an easy process, this “first novel” thing, and I will admit that it’s been harrowing, frustrating, and expensive; I’ve had to buy quite a few books on various aspects of writing fiction, including how to write better dialogue, how to write without outlines or come up with good beginnings. Oh, and various “thesauruses” to help me describe places, occupations, positive and negative traits, character expressions, emotions, or write “love scenes”! – there’s going to be one of those in the novel, too.  But writing a novel has been a life-long dream of mine, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to fulfill that ambition.

Anyhow, it’s just past noon now, so I better close this post and publish it before going on my midday break. So…adios, amigos!

---

[1] So-called because my now-retired college journalism instructor, Prof. Peter C. Townsend, gave me those gloves before we went to the eighth annual Columbia College Press Convention in New York City, which took place in early March of 1986. I tried to return them, but “T” told me to keep them. Those gloves have gone with me to New York (twice), Sevilla, Spain (in 1988), Colorado (in February 2000), Tampa (several times since 2001), and now New Hampshire. I have two other pairs that I acquired before I moved to Madison, but my New York gloves are my “emergency” pair.

[2] I do have an alternate title for the novella: Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken, which is an allusion to a song from Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow. But I published it as Reunion: A Story, so…..