Musings & Thoughts for Friday, March 29, 2024, or Man…is This Post Late or What?

Late Afternoon/Early Evening, Friday, March 29, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone. It’s a cloudy day here in my corner of Carroll County on this last day of the regular workweek and the last Friday of March 2024. By Florida standards, it’s a chilly early spring day in New Hampshire: The current temperature is 41°F (5°C) under cloudy conditions. (By New England standards, it means it’s warming up a bit.) With humidity at 52% and the wind blowing from the northwest at 10 MPH (16 Km/H), the feels-like temperature is 30°F (-1°C). Today’s forecast calls for mostly cloudy skies and a high of 46°F (8°C). Tonight, skies will remain mostly cloudy; the low will be 32°F (0°C).

I usually write my blog posts early, but today I am running a bit late. It was raining a bit this morning, and for some reason I just couldn’t sit down at my desk to write anything more complicated than the occasional social media post or comments on a friend’s YouTube videos. I don’t know if it’s exhaustion or anxiety (or both), but only now do I feel like I’m able to write something.

A Quick Life Update

I do have a bit of good news to share about my new life here in New Hampshire.

No, I haven’t met a new romantic interest or even made any new friends beyond Patti, Marc, and to a certain degree, Stuart. I might make friends later on in the future, and even though my chances of meeting a new girlfriend are astronomically slim, hope springs ever eternal.

I did, however, get my New Hampshire-issued EBT card in the mail today, a fact that eliminates one of the biggest sources of my anxiety. My new card has a balance of $0.00 because I still have funds in my Florida-issued one, but on the fifth of every month, I’ll get almost twice as much food assistance as I was getting in the Sunshine State. (Many Republican-led states are notoriously stingy when it comes to assisting disabled or low-earning residents, and Florida is no exception.)  

I’ve already created a PIN for my Granite State EBT card; I had to do the same thing when both my mom and I got SNAP assistance through Florida’s Department of Children and Families (DCF), so I did that before I did anything else this afternoon.

So, that’s one source of anxiety that’s gone now.

On Writing & Storytelling

Yesterday was one of those “I can’t come up with fresh material, so I’ll edit and revise instead” days. I suppose my non-writing anxieties are affecting my ability to be creative; it’s been well over a week since I completed Chapter 13 and all I have managed to write for Chapter 14 is a short email from Maddie (who’s on a work-related trip in London) to Jim, who couldn’t accompany her because he has his career-related responsibilities in New York City.

I love writing, so it’s not like I look at Reunion: Coda as a chore. And I do try to take weekends off and keep a reasonable working schedule, so I don’t think it’s exhaustion per se. Thus, if I have a “block” at all, it’s mostly because I tend to worry about things, sometimes a bit too much.

Of course, it’s natural to worry about important things such as being able to buy food and feel at home in a place where I had not even planned to move to. I knew that I was going to move out of my previous residence, sure, but I thought it would be either in the same city/county where I was in 2023, or, at worst, back in South Florida.

And, as I’ve mentioned before in posts related to issues with writer’s block and whatnot, there are times when I ask myself if all of this work on a novel is worth the time and effort I am putting into it. After all, Reunion: Coda is a follow-up to a well-received novella – Reunion: A Story – that’s been out on Amazon (in various editions) since the summer of 2018. That book has 23 positive ratings with an average rating of 4.8 stars and 14 written reviews…yet its sales have been stagnant, partly because it’s self-published, and partly because many of my friends either aren’t readers or the genre (a mix of coming of age and romance) isn’t their “thing.”

Now, I don’t write fiction because I want to be “rich and famous.” I write fiction because I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. Not a “famous” one – or at least not just for the sake of being name-dropped – but at least a respected (or admired) writer. I also like telling stories that both entertain and explore themes that most of us can relate to, including the need for love and affection (including sex), and how our emotions can either make or break us.

And while I think that reaching the summit of commercial success that Stephen King, James Patterson, and Danielle Steel have had in their long careers would be nice, I would be happy if I could sell enough books to be at least self-sufficient and not worry about ending up in a nursing home at some point in the future. I wouldn’t mind being as wealthy as Steve King, of course, but I would be happy if my royalties were sufficiently large for me to buy a modest home and allow me to not depend on the largesse of either New Hampshire or the federal government.

Will that happen with Reunion: Coda? Probably not, but I can always dream, right?

Anyway, I sometimes worry about my chances of success as a creative writer, and those worries sometimes affect my ability to focus on the “creative” aspect of writing.

Oh, and I just got back from getting groceries at Hannaford; Marc came to pick me up when I was halfway through this post. He and Patti leave tomorrow on vacation, so I had to “strike while the iron was hot,” if you get my drift.

It’s late, so I’ll close this post now. Stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.