On Writing & Storytelling: Monday Was a Bust on the Writing Front; Here’s Hoping Today’s a More Productive Day

Late Morning, Tuesday, February 20, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

“Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don’t have the strength to fight it.”― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

Hi, folks. It’s an icy late winter day here in Eidelweiss, the district of Madison where I’ve lived now for two months and five days. Currently, the temperature outside is 20°F (-7°C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 52% and a southerly wind barely blowing at 1 MPH (1 Km/H), the feels-like temperature is 37°F (3°C). The forecast for today calls for sunny skies and a high of 33°F (0°C). Tonight, we can expect clear skies and a low of 7°F (-14°C).

On Writing & Storytelling: All (Involuntarily) Quiet on the Writing Front

Yesterday was one of the least productive writing days I’ve had since I took a hiatus from Reunion: Coda to get ready for the Big Move North from Florida to New Hampshire in November of 2023. I did everything I needed to do to get ready for work; I had a good breakfast, wrote my blog early enough to take a midday break as close as possible to noon, ate lunch, went out to get fresh air and sunshine, and returned to my desk before 2 PM. And…despite my best intentions and efforts…I couldn’t do anything.

I’m not sure if I was tired or – this is a possibility, considering how sentimental I am – if part of my mind was thinking about the woman with whom I had a four-day tryst in Colorado. It was one of those romantic but bittersweet situations where you know you’re going to be with someone you love deeply but can’t be with because of distance and other circumstances, you have a grand time together, and then return from whence you came, never to meet that someone again. February 19 is the anniversary of our last full day together, and even though I try not to commemorate it in my mind, I think my heart and mind hold on to that memory…for sentimental reasons.

Then again, maybe I’m mentally – if not physically – tired; I’ve been working on the novel – my first – since March of 2023 with only the aforementioned break imposed on me by the move from Tampa to Madison. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say this again: People who don’t read constantly, don’t appreciate the writer’s craft, and don’t write regularly do not know how difficult, lonely, frustrating, and tiring it is to write for extended periods. Especially if you’re trying to write for a wide audience, and even more so if it’s a work of fiction you’re hoping to get others to buy.

Whatever the reason was – and perhaps it might have been a combination of the two possibilities I mentioned above – for yesterday’s failure to produce a new scene to Chapter 13 or even a single revision to the manuscript, I woke up this morning nagging myself for not even trying to edit the manuscript a little bit. Do better today, guy! I told myself before I made my way to the kitchen to brew my two daily cups of coffee and rustle up a good breakfast with what I have in the pantry and the refrigerator.

On Writing & Storytelling: Action This Day

My plan for today is simple: Follow my usual working day routine, which (in case you’re not familiar with it) consists of:

• Writing and posting my daily blog post on A Certain Point of View, Too before 12 PM (if possible)
• Taking a one- to two-hour break away from my desk to rest, relax, and eat lunch
• Returning to my office between 1 and 2 PM (or as close as possible to those times based on when I start my midday break
• Working on the novel – and only the novel – for a minimum of four hours, although I can write beyond that time limit if I’m on a roll and am not too tired

“To write is human, to edit is divine.”  ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

As of this writing, I have no idea whether I’ll start Scene Six of Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios or restrict myself to editing and revising some of the earlier chapters. Many writers, Stephen King included, plow their way through the first draft without fretting about plot holes, typos, awkward word choices, cheesy dialogue or plot points, and other flaws in their manuscripts. They do the revising and editing once they finish their rough drafts; their initial goal is to tell themselves the story from beginning to end, no matter what, then finesse it in the editing process – which is where, as one of my blogging friends always says, the true magic of storytelling takes place.

When I wrote Reunion: A Story – the first half of the Reunion Duology – back in 1998, this was my modus operandi as well: I wrote the first draft of the novella in three days, and because I did not plan to share it with a wider audience then, I only did some basic copy editing to the manuscript, showed it to a few people, then stored it as a file in Microsoft Word till, in 2018, I self-published it on Amazon, mostly on a whim.

Well, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that it wasn’t until December of 2023 that I was able to edit and revise Reunion to a level of quality that I’m happy with. Fixing typos, revising dodgy passages, correcting spelling mistakes, and getting my fictional world to match its real-world settings…all of that required many hours of thinking and writing…hours that could have been better spent on the second book of the duology – the one I’m working on.

I can’t afford to pay someone to take my manuscript and edit it, so I am alternating between writing “new copy” and making revisions and edits before I finish the “first draft” of Reunion: Coda. This stop-start-stop-start method seems to be working, but it’s a slow, often frustrating process. And, of course, the move from the Sunshine State – as well as the reasons for the move – took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, at least for a while.

Editing is “easier” than coming up with new material, but to move the story forward and finish it I need to write fresh stuff, too. The question is, folks, which task do I choose today?

I don’t know. Yet. We’ll see what happens when I come back to work after the break.