Musings & Thoughts for Friday, March 22, 2024, or: A Late Start to My Writing Workday

Late Morning/Midday, Friday, March 22, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone. It’s late morning (almost noon, in fact)on a sunny but frigid early spring day here in eastern New Hampshire. Currently, the temperature is 30°F (-1°C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 14% and the wind blowing from the north-northwest at 7 MPH (11 KMH), the feels-like temperature is 39°F (4°C). Today’s forecast calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 36°F (2°C). Tonight, we can expect scattered snow showers. The low will be 22°F (-6°C). And this being New England in late March, we’re under a Winter Storm Warning.

Sigh.

I’m running late – I woke up at 8:20 AM, which for me is the equivalent of sleeping till noon – so I’ll keep this blog post short.

On Writing & Storytelling: A Quick Update on My Novelist’s Journey

Yesterday was another disappointing day on the writing front; I did not get any good (or even mediocre) ideas on how to start Chapter 14. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. I didn’t want to waste my working day, so I focused on reading the version of the manuscript that is currently stored in my Kindle Create app, looking for places where “hard returns” in the source Word document file failed to show up in Kindle Create and made some of my paragraphs look unusually long and clunky.

I don’t know why coming up with a good – or even “just OK” – beginning to Chapter 14 has become such a slog. I know more or less what I want to happen – the epistolary chapter is supposed to set the stage for the last “Jim and Maddie” chapters and, by the way, the novel’s end. But every time I come into my office this week to pick up the narrative where it left off, I end up with “writer’s block.”

I suppose part of the problem is that I’m worried about other, more pressing things, such as how long it’s going to take for New Hampshire’s Department of Health and Human Services to process my application for benefits – SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid, primarily – and when I’ll get my EBT card to replace the one I have from Florida. My home state’s Department of Children and Families closed my case on March 12, and my current EBT card won’t be “refilled” after March 31. I will need food next month, and although I can afford some food with the Social Security benefits I receive, I can’t afford to buy groceries without SNAP benefits.

I try to avoid getting anxious over these things, but I tend to be a worrywart, so no matter what I do during the day, I get nervous and depressed. Add to that the sense of isolation I feel living in a rural area where I only know three human beings who like me, and my anxiety gets worse. Working on my novel is one of the few things I do to keep me relatively sane, but with those worries fluttering around me like a flock of albatrosses, it’s often hard to focus on the creative process.

But…back to working with the Kindle Create app and Reunion: Coda.

I don’t know if it’s a Word-Kindle Create compatibility issue, but I hate the issue with paragraph breaks that are in the source file on Word but vanished when I uploaded Reunion: Coda (or what I have written so far, anyway) to the Kindle Create app. Most of the time, the app doesn’t do this, but I have seen instances where I wrote two separate paragraphs and indicated them with a “hard return” (hitting the ENTER key) on Word, only to read the same part of my manuscript on Kindle Create and see the two paragraphs blended into one monster paragraph.

And since I am a nitpicker about this sort of thing, I want to fix these formatting issues before I upload the entire novel to Kindle Direct Publishing and not after. I already have experience with issues with Reunion: A Story and dealing with them after publication. It isn’t fun, let me tell you.

Action This Day

Well, even though I’ll have to adjust my entire schedule today, I’ll follow my usual routine of taking a break for lunch and a bit of rest. If I take two hours off, that means I’ll be back at work on the novel around 3 PM instead of 2 PM.

I hope that I can start working on Chapter 14 when I return to my desk. I want to. But…we’ll have to see what happens between now and then.

I’m burning daylight, though, so ciao for now, folks.