Musings for Wednesday, March 6, 2024, or: How My Birthday Went…and Scene Six (Rough Draft Version) is Finally Complete!

Mid-to-Late Morning, Wednesday, March 6, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the 1,453^rd post in A Certain Point of View, Too. It’s a nice early spring day here in eastern New Hampshire. Currently, the temperature is 40°F (4°C) under foggy conditions. With humidity at 96% and the wind blowing from the southeast at 1 MPH (2 KMH), the feels-like temperature is 57°F (14°C). Today’s forecast calls for scattered light rain showers throughout the day. The high will be 57°F (14°C). Tonight, we can expect heavy rain. The low will be 39°F (4°C).

As I write this, it’s (obviously) morning and the rain clouds are nowhere nearby, so I’m seeing (and enjoying) the kind of weather that I wish had been here yesterday for my 61^st birthday. Not that I was in a sour mood – far from it – but dark skies do dampen my spirits a tad, and since this was the first birthday I experienced away from Florida, I’d hoped that at least the morning would be sunny and inviting, regardless of the conditions later in the day.

(I write, or try to write, in the afternoon, so if I’m busy doing my “writer stuff” and focusing on dialogue, story beats, characterization, pacing, flashbacks, edits, and revisions, I don’t notice the rain or snow…much.)

As For My Birthday….

The Day itself was, for the most part, good, all things considered. Yes, I missed the familiar celebratory touches that marked most of my birthdays in Miami, Bogota, and even Tampa, but I still received over 100 “Happy birthday” messages on Facebook yesterday and this morning, plus I heard the (recorded) voice of my cousin Maria Clara Cajiao, who sent me a “feliz cumpleaños” audio clip via Instagram. She lives, like most of my extended family, in Colombia, and I have not seen her since 1997, so that was one of the highlights of my day. I also got a couple of presents via UPS, so….

On Writing & Storytelling: What was the Best Birthday Gift I Received? A Good Writing Day

I don’t know whether it was the unexpected Facebook outage, or Calliope decided to grant me my birthday wish, but yesterday was a damn good writing day. Not only did I write for over five hours (from 1 to 6:30 PM, if memory serves), and not only did I add 1,363 new words to the manuscript of Reunion: Coda, but I also wrapped up Scene Six of Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios, the novel’s 13^th chapter.

Of all the scenes in Reunion: Coda – including the ones in the epistolary chapter that precedes Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios – this one was the toughest to write, but if my friend Juan Carlos Hernandez’s assessment is proven correct by readers’ reactions when I publish the book later this year, it has some of the best writing I’ve ever done.

Here’s part of what Juan wrote in his assessment of Scene Six’s conclusion:

Beautiful ending, bro. 

The parents’ meeting is great and very realistic. I could see it happening.

And I visualized every word I read. 

That’s not everything Juan wrote in this particular email, but I don’t want to reveal too much about this part of the novel. As good as the writing is – at least from Juan’s perspective – and as much as part of me wants to show off more of this scene cos I am so pleased with how it came out, I need to keep it under wraps. So…no excerpt from the closing segment of Scene Six is forthcoming.

I will say this, though. Fans of Reunion: A Story – yes, the novella does have a modest following – will more than likely be happy with the ending of Scene Six, especially if they like Jim Garraty when he was a high school kid at South Miami High School in June of 1983. As Juan wrote in his final email of the night:

You should be happy; you wrote some great stuff on your birthday, brother.

On Writing & Storytelling: Action This Day

I have not yet decided, at “press time”, whether I will press on and start Scene Seven (the last one of the chapter) or spend my afternoon shift editing and revising. I have, of course, a good idea of what Scene Seven will be about and how it ends, so I could theoretically start it today.

However, I do see a need – and a pressing one at that – to take some time (preferably the entire work period) to calmly read the material I’ve written so far, especially over the past few days, and edit and revise it sooner rather than later. I might forget the bits that I have some nagging doubts about (you know, as in “This looks nice and it might work well, but is it necessarily vital that you keep that passage in the manuscript?”). So, it’s likely that today I’ll focus on analyzing the stuff that’s already written and fix the flaws I find, and then move on to Scene Seven once I’m done with that bit of literary housekeeping.

Aside from that, I don’t have any earth-shattering news to share, so I’ll close for now so I can post this and get on with my daily routine. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.