Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, March 26, 2024, or: Progress Report on My Writer’s Journey as a First-Time Novelist

Late Morning, Tuesday, March 26, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone. It’s a chilly and cloudy early spring day here in my corner of New England. Currently, the temperature is 37°F (3°C) under mostly cloudy conditions. With the wind blowing from the northeast at 6 MPH (9 Km/H) and humidity at 51%, the feels-like temperature is also 37°F (3°C). There is a Winter Weather advisory for parts of Maine and New Hampshire, and the forecast for today calls for light rain and a high of 39°F (4°C). Tonight, we can expect a mix of rain and snow showers. The low will be 35°F (2°C).

On Writing & Storytelling: Reunion: Coda Progress Update

While I did not have any good ideas on how to begin Chapter 14, I did get some work done on Reunion: Coda yesterday. I spent much of my Monday afternoon on my Kindle Create app, reading the draft of the novel saved there as a .kcb file with a critical eye and adjusting the text to avoid inconsistencies in the story and tighten up some of the narrative.

I would have preferred, naturally, to write new material for the next chapter in the novel. Still, after several unsuccessful attempts to write a good opening scene, I decided to go into editing mode and not waste a working day by giving up on the Reunion: Coda project, even temporarily. I’m already behind my self-imposed deadline for self-publishing the novel, and I am determined to see this through to completion. If that means shifting my priorities from writing fresh copy to editing and revising, so be it. I’ll have to deal with edits and revisions anyway, so….

I am making good progress, though. Yesterday, for instance, I added titles to scenes that did not have them, plus I fixed most of the formatting issues caused by the interaction between the Kindle Create app and Microsoft Word. As I mentioned in previous posts, Kindle Create is mostly compatible with Word, but when you have a subheading that says “The Garraty Residence, 8 PM” on the original Word .docx file and it comes out as “The Garraty Residence, 8 Pm” on the Kindle Create version, it can be annoying. You can’t – as I learned when I ran into this issue last summer when I revised Reunion: A Story for the 2023 reissue – change the case from lower to upper manually; you have to go through a series of steps in Kindle Create’s formatting window and give the app the proper (UPPER CASE) command.

As I said, it’s annoying and time-consuming, but the result is worth it.

Action This Day

I hope that today will be the day when I start Reunion: Coda’s 14^th chapter. I know, more or less, what I want to happen between Jim and Maddie (this is a “grown-up Jim” part of the story, as is the rest of the novel). The tricky part for me is how I want to write the opening scene of the chapter. I haven’t figured that out yet, so I am going to take some time today during the midday break to brainstorm until I have an idea. It doesn’t have to be a brilliant idea. It doesn’t even have to be a particularly good idea, either.  It can be a mediocre idea, for all I care. It doesn’t matter…so long as I have a foundation that I can build on.

In any case, I will try my best to make headway on that front. If I somehow can’t…then I’ll resume making edits and revisions to the existing manuscript. As long as I get some work on the novel done, I’ll be content.

In Other News

Yesterday, after an annoying bout of low self-confidence and being buoyed by the helpful advice of a friend, I went to the garage and retrieved one of the lighter boxes with some of my Blu-rays. I fretted about a relatively simple task because when we packed the boxes in Florida back in November, it took two people to carry most of them from my bedroom to the Florida room. That’s how heavy most of those moving boxes are. The ones with Blu-rays and DVDs are a tad lighter, and I can lift and carry one quite a way if the path is mostly in a straight line. Zigs, zags, and inclines don’t make the task impossible, but I’m not as limber or fearless as I once was, so I was reluctant – to say the least – to grab the aforementioned box and bring it in.

I can’t, however, let negativity and fear dominate my existence, and I hate having to ask for help unless it’s necessary, so I gritted my teeth, went into the garage, and – after searching for a box I believed I could carry – I found a box marked “Blu-rays and DVDs,” and – even though it was heavy and hard to handle, carried it from the garage and took it to my room.

Although it did not contain the Star Wars Blu-rays I hoped to find, it did have Blu-rays that, until yesterday, were in storage. Some of them were also in my “I wish I could watch this” list, so…..

I still need to sort through and organize them before I try retrieving another box in hopes of finding my Star Wars movies. I’ll do that over the weekend; I need to work on my novel during the workweek, and I don’t prioritize entertainment over work – even if “work” entails writing a novel for self-publication.