Musings & Thoughts for Thursday, March 14, 2024, or: How I Spent My ‘Hump Day’

Late Morning, Thursday, March 14, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone. It’s a cold but otherwise nice early spring day here in my corner of Carroll County. Currently, the temperature is 39°F (4°C) under mostly cloudy skies. With the wind blowing from the north-northeast at 2 MPH (3 KMH) and humidity at 73%, it feels like 57°F (14°C). The forecast for the Madison area calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 57°F (14°C). Tonight, we can expect scattered rain and snow showers. The low will be 34°F (1°C).

As you know, yesterday I went to the local New Hampshire Health and Human Services office in Conway for a mandatory in-person interview as part of the process to receive state government assistance such as SNAP (aka “food stamps”) and Medicaid.

I’m not going to write a detailed account of the interview, except to note that unlike Florida state employees – including those who work for the Department of Children and Families (DCF) – the folks at New Hampshire HHS seem to genuinely want to help folks like me who need government assistance. In all my time in Florida, at least since 1972, I only met a few DCF case workers who were as nice as the woman who interviewed me yesterday.

I still have to fill out and return a couple of forms, but I am 80% sure that I’ll get approval from the HHS main office in Manchester.

On Writing & Storytelling: Fine Tuning Chapter 13…and Getting Ready to Start Chapter 14

After I got back home from my interview – it wasn’t a long one – I followed most of my usual workday routine except for the “going outside for fresh air and sunshine” bit. I was a bit tired and tense, so I took a hot shower and changed into comfy stay-at-home clothes, ate a modest midday snack (I wouldn’t deign to say I had “lunch”), and rested until 2 PM.

Per my standard operating procedure when I finish either a scene or a chapter, I did not immediately begin to write Chapter 14, which will be a Jim-and-Maddie episode in the Spring 2000 timeline of the novel. I like to take a couple of days to look over the Reunion: Coda manuscript to see if the “new stuff” marries well with what I’ve written since March of 2023. Nowadays I like to use the “Read Aloud” option in Word. It’s almost like listening to an audiobook (sans atmospheric music and a professional actor’s voice) in its raw form, and there have been times that I’ve made corrections to the text because some element – be it narration, dialogue, or specific detail of a character or setting – didn’t sound right when I listened to it using the “Read Aloud” option (which you can find in the Review section of the “ribbon” at the top of the screen.

So, I spent all of my working hours reading and listening to the last two scenes of Goodbye, Farewell, and Adios (aka Chapter 13…though you won’t see numbered chapters in the finished book), making the occasional quick edit and checking for tonal consistency with “what came before” (either with Reunion: A Story or the earlier chapters of Reunion: Coda). I’m not a professional editor of fiction, so I can’t be 100% sure, but I think I can say, “So far so good.”

Today I will be doing more of the same, although I hope to finish the “editing and revising” stage of my workday a bit earlier so I can devote some time to brainstorming story beats for Chapter 14.  I want to get back to Professor James Garraty’s world; I’ve spent enough time in Jim’s high school days (which, not surprisingly, are loosely based on mine);  I also want to finish both his story arc and the novel.

We’ll see what develops, won’t we?