Late Morning/Midday, Thursday, April 18, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire
Hi, everyone.
It’s a bright, sunlit New England morning in my corner of Madison – actually, Eidelweiss District – in eastern New Hampshire as I begin this, my 1,500th post on this WordPress blog of mine. Currently, the temperature is 51°F (11°C) under mostly sunny skies. With humidity at 46% and the wind blowing from the east-southeast at 8 MPH (13 Km/H), the feels-like temperature is 59°F (15°C). Today’s forecast calls for partly sunny skies and a high of 59°F (15°C). Tonight, we can expect scattered light rain showers. The low will be 39°F (4°C).
A Day in the Life….
I don’t have much to offer in personal news; my routine here is not too different from the one I had at my last Florida home. I wake up early in the morning. I go to my office and boot up my PC, spend some on social media (Facebook and Twitter, mostly, with an occasional visit to Instagram), check my emails and bank account, and watch a couple of YouTube videos (usually Farron Balanced and some classical music or “standards” music videos) before I make my way to the kitchen to prep a quick breakfast and get “fueled” with coffee so I can begin another day of writing.
If you read this blog regularly, you may recall that I like to write my blog in the late morning so I can take a two-hour break around midday before ducking back into the office and getting on with what I consider my “day job” – working on Reunion: Coda, my first novel (and the follow-up volume to Reunion: A Story).
If all goes according to plan, I begin my break at noon and end it at 2 PM. Sometimes, like yesterday and today, this doesn’t happen because I’m either too tired or too distracted to stick to “The Plan.”
Today, for instance, I woke up early enough to be – theoretically, anyway – able to start writing my blog post around 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time. However, I fell asleep well after midnight, so I only had six and a half hours of sleep. I’m not exhausted, at least not enough to throw my hands up in the air and say, “Fuck it, I’m taking the day off.” But…I’m not at my best, and I probably won’t be until I shower, change into a clean set of clothes, and take my rest-and-lunch break. Since it’s already slightly past noon, I know my schedule Is already a joke – I’ll have to start working on Reunion: Coda between 2:30 and 3 PM. In theory, I could start working on the manuscript as late as 4, but I’d rather not.
Apropos of that….
On Writing & Storytelling: Action This Day
I do plan on working on the manuscript, even though I’ll start later than I’d like. I don’t know if I’ll be up to starting Chapter 15 today; whenever I finish a chapter, regardless of its length, I usually can’t keep the momentum and move on to the next chapter easily. I might have done that a few times when I began Reunion: Coda in March of last year, but I don’t think I’ve been able to pick up the narrative after reaching a chapter’s endpoint.
Of course, it was harder to pick up the story where I’d left off when I was switching between chapters set in the 1980s and those set in the novel’s “Present Day” (Spring 2000). Not only do I use past tense in the former and present tense in the latter, but I have to tell the story from two drastically different perspectives – those of James Kevin Garraty as a teenager, and those of Jim at age 35. It’s the same person, but time has changed how Jim acts and experiences life.
I was hoping that now that I’ve dealt with Jim’s high school graduation and can focus on his relationship with Maddie in early 2000, picking up the narrative would be easier. Um, no…it’s not.
(And, of course, since I’m a “seat of my pants” writer and make the story up as I go along, picking up a narrative thread is insanely hard. I wish my mind was geared toward a more structured way of writing, with outlines and pre-planned story beats, but…it’s not. So the struggle, Dear Reader, is real.)
Anyway, I’ll be working when I get back to my desk after my break (which will probably be around 3 PM today). I would love to start Chapter 15, but it is more likely that I’ll be revising and editing rather than writing “fresh copy.”
Oh well. C’est la vie.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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