Musings & Thoughts for Sunday, March 17, 2024, or: Weekend Update, Part the First

Late Morning/Early Afternoon, Sunday, March 17, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone. It is a cold, gray, and wet St. Patrick’s Day here in my corner of Eidelweiss, the district in Madison that – for good or ill – I now call home. Currently, the temperature is 39°F (4°C) under a dreary veil of clouds. With humidity at 99% and the wind blowing from the southwest at 3 MPH (5 KMH), the feels-like temperature is 46°F (8°C). Today’s forecast calls for scattered rain showers. The high will be 50°F (10°C). Tonight, the skies will be mostly clear. The low will be 30°F (-1°C).

Weekend Update, Part the First: My Saturday

1.     I Worked on the Novel a Bit Yesterday

Although yesterday was one of the two days that I usually take off from working on Reunion: Coda (my first novel, in case you’re new to this space), I spent a bit of time making a few necessary adjustments to the manuscript. Nothing major, mind you, but I feared that if I didn’t make them when I did, I might forget all about the errors that need to be fixed. I did that with the first book in the Reunion Duology (Reunion: A Story), and I lived to regret it because even though I revamped it a year ago per the recommendations from my now-retired college journalism professor, Peter C. Townsend, I didn’t get all of the editorial bloopers out of the novella till last December.

I don’t want to go through that ordeal again with the novel, so I’m trying to edit the manuscript every time I finish a chapter before moving on to the next chapter. Stephen King does not recommend this method; in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Steve-O urges the reader to focus on writing the first draft of the story from start to finish without pausing to edit or revise.  

King also says that writing a first draft of a novel should not take more than three months; otherwise, the characters and plot will get stale in the writer’s mind.

Well, that’s what works for King, who has been writing fiction far longer than I have. And I wish that’s what works for me. But I’m not wired the same way that my favorite writer of fiction is. I tend to edit as I go along, which is why sometimes I spend two hours writing a “simple” blog post (such as the one you are reading now).

So, that’s why I decided to do some work on my day off yesterday. It’s better to take care of tiny problems in the novel now rather than go through the “Oops! I see a glaring error in the text” ordeal after I publish Reunion: Coda.

2.     I Relaxed – or Tried to Relax – During the Rest of the Day

After I finished my editing and revising tasks sometime after 12 PM, I watched 12 Angry Men (1957) on Amazon Prime Video. Directed by acclaimed director Sidney Lumet and adapted from a teleplay that aired in 1954 on the CBS anthology series Studio One, this movie is a legal drama that takes place almost entirely in a New York City jury room as 12 jurors deliberate over a seemingly cut-and-dried murder case. It wasn’t a huge commercial success in ’57, but it earned critical acclaim even back then, and 12 Angry Men is now considered to be one of the greatest American movies of all time.

I had never seen 12 Angry Men – legal dramas don’t usually thrill me – but Amazon Prime Video has it on its “free to watch” rotation. I was going to go offline and watch something in my bedroom, but I decided to give the movie a chance. It was free, after all, and if I didn’t like it, I could turn it off.

Well, I did like it, and I watched the whole film, even though I intuitively knew that Henry Fonda’s Juror #8 would carry the day at the end. I thought the script was well-written, and the performances by Fonda’s cast mates – including Jack Klugman, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Lee J. Cobb, and Jack Warden – were riveting.

I also did what I usually do on weekends – played computer games, listened to tunes on my Amazon Music App, and lurked on social media. I also read – in dribs and drabs – parts of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, by historian Richard B. Frank.

I thought about rewatching  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but I had a lot on my mind last night – none of it good, I’m sorry to say – and I forgot to log off my PC at a decent enough time to watch a long feature film. So…I did not watch Indy V. Maybe today…if I don’t get into another bout of worrying about my present and future here in New Hampshire.

Well, I had to go to Walmart to get a few items – mostly food, but I needed a small laundry basket, too – so I had to pause in the middle of writing this blog post. Thus, it’s now almost 1 PM EST here, and we’re about to get another bout of light rain on this cold, somewhat cheerless St. Patrick’s Day.

So…I’ve said my piece. Ciao for now!