Musings & Thoughts for Friday, February 16, 2024, or: Yep…Another Reunion: Coda Progress Update!

Late Morning/Midday, Friday, February 16, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone. It’s a chilly but gorgeous late morning here in Eidelweiss, the district of Madison where I’ve lived for just over two months. Currently, the temperature is 28°F (-2°C) under partly cloudy conditions. With the wind blowing from the northwest at 11 MPH (18 Km/H) and humidity at 55%, the wind chill factor is 19°F (-7°C). Today’s forecast calls for mostly cloudy skies and a high of 32°F (0°C). Tonight, the skies will be partly cloudy. The low will be 18°F (-8°C).

Last night – and early this morning – we had some light snow showers. It was still snowing when I got up this morning around 7:30, but it stopped sometime before I got motivated and made a relatively decent breakfast of orange-flavored Tang, a glass of milk with Carnation Breakfast Essentials (the 21^st Century incarnation, I suppose, of Carnation Instant Breakfast), a bacon, cheese, and egg Toaster Scramble, and two cups of coffee. This was sometime between 8:30 and 9:15 AM, and as I ate this morning’s repast, I looked out my window and saw snow falling from the trees out in the “backyard.” It looked like a fresh snowfall, but it was just “old” snow dropping from tree branches.

On Writing & Storytelling: A Novelist’s Progress Report

As it turns out, yesterday’s work session was devoted to – yep – editing and revising the manuscript for Reunion: Coda. Naturally, since I wrote a rough draft of Chapter 13’s fifth scene on Wednesday, I focused most of my efforts on that particular section of my (first) novel.

While I cannot – and will not – say that Scene Five of Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios was almost perfect on Wednesday night, its first iteration was a joy to re-read and work on. My friend Juan Carlos Hernandez, who is an actor and filmmaker based in New York City, is my unofficial Gamma Reader, and he said that even though there were some segments where my wording was vague and at times confusing, the scene overall was both funny and touching – which, of course, is what I was hoping it would be.

Armed with the knowledge that some bits of Scene Five needed fixes, I spent much of my time poring over it, looking for ways to address the issues that Juan had noticed and called to my attention. And, of course, while I was fixing them, my copy editor’s eye also found a few goofs in the text. Nothing major – just a few instances of unnecessary repetition and typos missed by Microsoft Word’s spellcheck functionality – but they needed to be corrected before I moved on to Scene Six.

So, where do I stand with Reunion: Coda 11 months after I began this project with the words Some phrases just get under my skin. Take “Everything happens for a reason,” for example. It’s like nails on a chalkboard to me. It’s worse than “Think outside the box” or “At the end of the day…” – those overused phrases that you hear on TV all the time. It’s just a lazy way of saying something without really saying anything at all.

According to Word’s Word Count function, these are the latest major statistics:

Pages: 185

Words: 77,075

On Writing & Storytelling: Action This Day

I don’t know, folks, if I’ll do more editing or start writing Scene Six after my midday break. Part of me wants to do the latter, of course; as I noted earlier, I’ve been working on Reunion: Coda since early March of last year, with a necessary hiatus between late November and early January because of the Big Move North from the Tampa Bay area to Madison. I sense that I am getting awfully close to finishing the manuscript – at least in its revised first or second-draft version – and while I do not want to succumb to the temptation to “rush to the finish line,” I do want to complete Reunion: Coda so I can release it (and enjoy reading the finished version along with some of you folks) sometime in 2024.

So, my hope is that when I come back here to my writing room either at 1 or 2 PM, my Muse (Calliope, the goddess of Epic Poetry and guardian of novelists everywhere) will once again be kind to me and inspire me as she did a couple of days ago. I prefer writhing “fresh copy” to editing and revising, even though both those elements of writing go hand in hand and are essential if you’re going to write anything, be it a blog post, love letter, or first novel.

Speaking of midday breaks, it’s almost noon, so I better wrap this up and post it on WordPress ASAP. So, dear friends, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.