Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, February 13, 2024, or: Melancholia Aside, Today is ‘Back to Work’ for an Aspiring Novelist

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another entry in A Certain Point of View, Too. It is a chilly, gray winter morning, the kind of New England day that makes one want to just stay in a comfortable room with a book in one hand and a cup of coffee or hot chocolate in the other. Currently, the temperature is 31°F (0°C) under cloudy conditions. With the wind blowing from the northeast at 9 MPH (14 Km/H) and humidity at 56%, the wind chill is 23°F (-5°C). Today’s forecast calls for mostly cloudy skies and a high of 35°F (2°C). Tonight, the skies will be mostly clear. The low will be 18°F (-8°C).

Melancholia for a Sad Anniversary

As usual on this date, I feel melancholic because today is the 59th anniversary of my dad’s death. He and his copilot, Ernesto Revelo, were killed in a pre-dawn crash when their poorly maintained and grossly overloaded C-46 cargo plane’s port (left) engine caught fire shortly after taking off from Miami International Airport en route to San Salvador in El Salvador. Dad and “Neto” attempted to circle back to MIA for an emergency landing, but when they realized they couldn’t do so, they opted to crash land in an auto junkyard close to the airport.

I’ve written a few posts about this event before; I have no wish to spend my morning doing so again, so I’ll just refer you to Musings & Thoughts for Saturday, February 13, 2021: Mortuus luctrus patris mei.

On Writing & Storytelling: Action This Day

Because I went out yesterday with my friend and fellow blogger Patti to run some errands (first to the DMV to get my New Hampshire non-driver’s ID, then food shopping at Market Basket) and to have lunch at Fiesta Jalisco (a family-owned Mexican restaurant in North Conway), I didn’t work on Reunion: Coda – my first novel.

Maybe if I hadn’t chosen to drink beer with my burrito and enchilada I might have at least tried to do some editing and revising (at the very least). But, hey. I rarely ever go out socially – mostly by choice, but partly by circumstances – and hanging out with Patti is a good excuse to have a beer and relax. And one Sam Adams beer isn’t enough to make me drunk, especially since I drank it with a huge midday meal.

However, when you add the fact that I’d been worried about getting my state ID for over a month, and the combination of waking up early and then going food shopping after a hearty meal, I was tired by the time I sat down at my desk sometime after 2:15 PM. I struggled mightily just to write yesterday’s blog entry…so I wasn’t in the mood to tackle the all-important manuscript to Reunion: Coda.

Obviously, I am not drinking beer now; I didn’t buy a six-pack of Heineken yesterday (although I considered doing so), and there’s no beer here…and what there was belonged to the other tenant in the house, a guy named Stuart. (I’ve accepted two cans of a beer called Natty, but it’s…not my kind of brew, to be honest.) So…even though I’m not in the best of spirits, today is a working day for me,

The thing is, my friends, as of this writing I have no idea what I’ll be doing after my midday lunch and rest break. I could start writing Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios’ fifth scene, or I could keep copy-editing the manuscript and make any revisions I deem absolutely necessary and leave Scene Five for tomorrow. As it stands, I need to do both things, but I can only do one thing.

As James Garner and Mariette Hartley used to say in the old Polaroid camera commercials, we’ll see what develops.

Carefully Watched Packages: Stephen King Edition

I usually treat myself to one “just-for-fun” Amazon order per month, and last week I splurged on two items because I had a $25 credit on one of my credit cards and I needed to use it up before they send me a check here in New Hampshire. My “February Fun” buy turned out to be two Stephen King-related items: a limited edition steelbook (and 4K UHD) Blu-ray of Brian De Palma’s 1976 horror film Carrie, and a reissue of the paperback edition of King’s novelette Cycle of the Werewolf. I have another edition of the latter in a Silver Bullet tie-in paperback that includes Cycle of the Werewolf and King’s own adaptation of it in screenplay format (Silver Bullet), but that volume is iin a box marked “Tom Clancy and Stephen King Books” in the garage, and I can’t get to it easily. So….

Amazon predicted that the orders would arrive separately, one today (maybe) and one tomorrow (maybe) when I ordered them on Friday. Nope…the folks at the nearby Amazon facility made the wiser choice to pack the book and movie in the same shipment, and according to the tracking data, UPS says it’s “Out for Delivery.”

I hope “our” driver brings it here before sunset, or, if he or she can’t, leaves it out on the front porch rather than by the side of the road on Huttwil Drive.  We – thankfully – don’t have porch pirates out here, and it’s not snowing here today. But I hate it when circumstances force UPS to leave it out by the road because the driveway is too icy or it’s too snowy for the delivery to be made at the front door.

Anyway…I don’t have anything else to share, and I do need to take my midday break, so…”That’s All Folks!”