Musings & Thoughts for Wednesday, April 17, 2024, or: On Writing & Storytelling – A Quick SITREP on My Novel’s Progress

Late Morning/Midday, Wednesday, April 17, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi there, folks.

It’s a chilly but beautiful day here in my corner of eastern New Hampshire. Currently, the temperature is 46°F (8°C) under sunny conditions. With the wind blowing from the northeast at 3 MPH (4 Km/H)  and humidity at 43%, the feels-like temperature is 63°F (17°C). Today’s forecast for the Madison/Eidelweiss area calls for sunny skies and a high of 59°F (15°C).  The skies will be mostly clear tonight, and the low will be 32°F (0°C).

On Writing & Storytelling: An Update on Reunion: Coda’s Progress

I was going to do another one of the writing exercises from How to Write a Romance, or: How to Write Witty Dialogue, Smoldering Love Scenes, & Happily Ever Afters, but according to WordPress’s “Stats” counter, those posts aren’t generating too much traffic, so I’ll put them on ice for a while. I usually don’t let the almighty “pageviews count dictate my choice of topics, but putting those Writing Exercises posts together is time-consuming and – for me – labor intensive. Since they’re not attracting many readers and barely any likes or comments, I can only conclude that they’re not of much interest to non-writers.

The only topic that I can write about (but don’t expect to attract a lot of readers, likes, or comments with) is the progress of Reunion: Coda, the novel – and the second book in the Reunion Duology – that I’ve been working on for slightly over a year. So, far, this week has been more productive than most, considering that yesterday I wrote the fifth and hopefully last scene for the 14^th chapter.

According to Microsoft Word’s “Word Count” function, here is where I stand in my novelist’s journey:

• Number of Pages: 203
• Number of Words: 86,286
• Number of Paragraphs: 2,442
• Number of Lines: 6,151

(Over on WriteItNow, where I back up my novel’s first draft and use the “Story Board” function frequently, the page count is higher but the word count is lower for some reason.)

Anyway, for those of you who are still interested – even remotely – in Reunion: Coda and how I’m doing as a first-time novelist, I am optimistic that I will start Chapter 15 soon, perhaps as early as this afternoon if I return to my desk after my midday break feeling energetic and inspired.

I’d like to think that I am hitting my stride – as far as being productive goes, anyway – now that I’ve gotten used to living in New Hampshire, I might not be “settled in” in toto as I wish; I still need tons of help building my IKEA shelves because that’s one huge task that I can’t do, no matter how much I wish I could. But at least I have established a clear and easily adhered-to routine that I, with rare exceptions, follow daily. And I work on my writing – whether adding to the manuscript or either of my two blogs – every day. (Five days a week are devoted to the novel, and I blog daily.)

Of course, this could all be a mirage and I might stumble and falter when it comes to starting the next chapter of the novel. I hope not, and I will do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Visualizing the Characters in Reunion: Coda

One of the biggest disappointments that I have regarding this project is this. I sometimes wish I could put out an illustrated edition of Reunion: Coda, along the lines of Stephen King’s The Stand: Complete and Unabridged and the large format trade paperbacks of his The Dark Tower series. I love the concept of adding an occasional illustration – one or two per chapter – to accompany the text of the novel.

This was a “thing” back in the 19th century; I’ve seen references to illustrations made for Charles Dickens’ novels, including Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol. And James Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is famous for its artwork by John Tenniel. Nowadays, most novels don’t include illustrations, but there are exceptions. I own quite a few, most of them works by King, that, in addition to the ones I already mentioned, include Cycle of the Werewolf and The Eyes of the Dragon.

I used to draw – not very well, I’m afraid – when I took art classes at South Miami High School with Ms. Robin Lemo during my junior and senior years, but I’m not skilled enough to draw 14 or 15 illustrations for a book I’m going to self-publish this year. So, my preference would be to hire a graphic designer or illustrator who could draw black-and-white illustrations based on characters and scenes from both Reunion: A Story and Reunion: Coda. (For instance, Jim’s first encounter with Marty at South Miami and Jim and Maddie’s reunion at JFK International Airport would be good subjects for drawings.

The advantage of hiring a professional artist is that I could give him or her specific prompts, such as “Make Marty outstandingly beautiful, as described in both books, but don’t make Jim or Mark look like they’re male models that stepped out of a Seventeen photo shoot. Make them ‘good-looking,’ yeah, but don’t make them ‘young Brad Pitt’ hunks, okay?”

The problem with hiring a professional artist is, of course, that I can’t afford to. I’m earning some royalties from Reunion: A Story, sure, but not enough so that I don’t have to survive on a fixed income from Social Security. The job – for the artist – that I require would take time and hard work that must be compensated financially, and although I might be able to afford one illustration, I can’t afford to pay for 15-20 drawings, which is the number I’m estimating that I need to illustrate Reunion: Coda.

I happen to know at least two artists with the talent and skill I require. One I know from my days on the Catalyst staff; in fact, he’s one of my closest friends in Miami. He might, if I asked him, contribute one drawing gratis or for a modest fee if he had the free time to create it. But 15-20? I doubt it.

The second artist? She’s a portrait artist and art teacher. I’ve known her for years as a fellow blogger and online writer, and I know she’s wickedly talented and would be ideal for the job. But…I don’t know her in person, and we’re not close pals….at least not as close as my Miami friend from college. And she’s busy with her job and art projects. So…no go there.

My only solution to the whole dilemma is to not use illustrations at all, not even those that I could have Microsoft’s AI-powered DALL-E create for me based on prompts taken from my manuscript or chats with Copilot (aka Bing chatbot). The images I’ve managed to acquire via the AI route are nice and all, but (a) Copilot and DALL-E have new safeguards – probably put in place by Microsoft recently – to prevent users from asking for pornographic illustrations that depict graphic sex or violence, and (b) when DALL-E does cooperate and creates images that follow my prompts, the resulting portraits of characters like, say, Jim and Mark look like they stepped out of a Hollywood casting call. They look like teens, at least the less cartoony illustrations do, but they’re too “pretty” to be realistic.

I still use DALL-E to create character illustrations, mainly for inspiration or for this blog, but even if I could get Copilot/DALL-E to override the current “censorship” limitations on them – I couldn’t, for instance, get the AI to create an image of Jim and Maddie kissing at JFK, or one of Mark and Jim talking in the school cafeteria in the early 1980s. A human artist could have done those illustrations (I would have loved a drawing of Mark and Jim having those post-commencement Heinekens, for instance!), but at a price, Dear Readers. At a price.

Oh, well. At least I have a great cover design for the print editions (there will be two: hardcover and paperback) created by my friend Juan Carlos Hernandez, while for the Kindle edition, I will use the cover art I designed with Canva back in October, shortly before the whole “move to New Hampshire” process began. Kindle Direct Publishing’s selection of predesigned cover art is…sparse, to put it kindly.

Anyway, it’s almost time for my midday R&R break, so see you later, folks.