Musings & Thoughts for Wednesday, February 21, 2024, or: Life in Madison Creeps in its Petty Pace from Day to Day…..

Late Morning, Wednesday, February 21, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone. It’s a cold, mostly gray-tinged, late winter morning here in my corner of New England. Currently, the temperature is 25°F (-4°C) under mostly cloudy conditions. With the wind blowing from the east-northeast at 1 MPH (2 Km/H), the feels-like temperature is 41°F (5°C). Today’s forecast calls for partly sunny skies and a high of 37°F (3°C). Tonight, the skies will be mostly clear. The low will be 14°F (-10°C).

All My Yesterday

I don’t have much in the way of news, either about my novel, Reunion: Coda, or life in general.

Regarding the former, I worked on the manuscript for a while yesterday afternoon. I couldn’t – again – produce any new copy even though I’ve finally chosen one of the two concepts I had in mind for Scene Six of Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios, the chapter that closes the high school era narrative of the novel. Instead, I focused on editing and revising some sections of Chapter 12 (aka “The One with the Emails”). It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but it was what I could do, and at least I got something done.

As for life in Madison….

One of the things that contributed to my difficulties in writing was that Stuart, the other tenant who lives on the opposite side of the house from “my” section, had two of his buddies over for a visit. They seem to be nice guys, but when they sit in the living room to play cards, drink beer, and chew the fat, I can hear their voices – but not their conversation – in my office even if I close my door and play one of my digital albums on Amazon Music. I’d put on headphones to better mask the babbling that reaches my ears, but unlike the Lenovo all-in-one PC I used until the spring of 2022 back in Tampa, this PC doesn’t have a jack to plug headphones into, so….

Stuart, of course, is entitled to have his friends over, and I don’t feel comfortable complaining about the noise they make when they have their infrequent gatherings here, so I didn’t say anything. I did feel frustrated because I do write better in a quieter environment, and I did have every intention to start Scene Six. But…I couldn’t…so….

Other than that, I am doing as well as I can. Even though I still don’t function all that well when it’s too cold, I am handling the New England winter better than I did when I arrived here on December 15, 2023. The bouts of homesickness have become less acute and infrequent, though they still hit me on occasion. Of course, I still have days when I feel melancholy or frustrated – we all do, you know – and it bleeds into my blog posts. But…I’m getting into a routine here, just as I did back in 2016 when I left Miami to start a new life in the Tampa Bay area.

Well, as I said earlier, there’s not much else I can add, except to say that I received an email from Kindle Direct Publishing yesterday informing me that I can expect a royalty payment in a few days. It should be deposited into my bank account on February 29 or shortly after.

I’m sure that the payment won’t launch me into the literary stratosphere where Danielle Steel, Stephen King, James Patterson, or Nora Roberts reside, at least as far as book sales are concerned. But a payment is, literally, money in the bank, even if it barely covers the cost of a trip to McDonald’s or Starbucks.