Late Morning, Monday, May 13, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire
Hi, everyone. It’s a gorgeous spring day here in Madison’s Eidelweiss District. The sun is shining, the skies overhead are crisp and blue, and it’s warming up a bit, too. Currently, the temperature is 61°F (16°C) under sunny conditions. With humidity at 51% and the wind blowing from the southeast at 4 MPH (6 Km/H), it feels like 73°F (23°C). Today’s forecast calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 66°F (19°C). Tonight, we can expect scattered light rain showers. The low will be 47°F (8°C).
Weekend Update, Part the Second: My (Somewhat) Somber Sunday
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Sunday was Mother’s Day 2024. I tried not to dwell on it much, but it was still a somber occasion. I can’t get past two facts: my mother died in 2015, and my being in New Hampshire is just one more unintended consequence of her passing’s aftermath. And as hard as I try to make the best of a strange set of circumstances, there are times when I get bouts of homesickness for South Florida and life in the big city.
So, I spent my Sunday with mixed emotions. I expressed some of them in part one of my Weekend Update and added a comment with memories about Mom on Facebook a bit later in the evening.
Then, to at least assuage some of the sadness, I devoted some time to playing Regiments as the CO of the 1st Brigade, U.S. 3rd Armored Division in the Runway single battle scenario of this fun and challenging 2022 war game created by Bird’s Eye Games and published by MicroProse.
I set the time limit for 30 minutes and the difficulty level to Medium. Regiments is challenging enough in Easy difficulty levels, but the AI enemy is cannier, and more aggressive (even in scenarios where the enemy is on the defensive), so even if a player has gained a lot of experience playing Regiments in the lower skill setting, it’s wise to think twice before sending a section of M3 Cavalry Fighting Vehicles (the scout version of the M2 Bradley) to reconnoiter the advance route of the first armored task force against an enemy-held position without backup.
(Also, even though I usually pick the 30-minute option on Skirmish mode, my Regiments sessions often go for an hour to 90 minutes because I pause frequently.)
I’m not going to regale you with a long account of how I defeated the Warsaw Pact yesterday. Suffice it to say that I acquitted myself well, even though the Red Force inflicted serious casualties on the Blue Force – most of them from the AI-controlled West German unit supporting my American force.
After that, I spent a relatively quiet and uneventful night. I made a quick dinner (one Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza with Pepperoni), then tried to watch Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker without falling asleep…and failed.
Thus ends my Weekend Update for this week.
On Writing & Storytelling: Another Workweek Begins
It’s – obviously – Monday, May 13, 2024 in my part of the planet. It’s also the beginning of another regular Monday-Friday workweek, so I am trying to get back into “Novelist Mode” after a weekend of not dealing much with the Reunion: Coda manuscript.
I don’t know – yet – how today is going to unfold. With Chapter 16 mostly finished (I’m still waiting for feedback from my Beta Reader before I can completely close the books on it), I want to start working on Chapter 17 as soon as possible. I have – as always – a vague idea of how I want the first scene to start, but I need to visualize it a bit more before I type the first sentence of the starting paragraph.
(In other words, I need to re-read Chapter 16, AKA The Breathless Hush of Evening, then ask myself, “Well, what happens next?” Only when I can answer that question clearly and fully will I be able to write the first sentence to begin Chapter 17, Scene One.)
I want to start the new chapter sooner rather than later; as I’ve said before in other writing-related posts, I have been working on this novel for 14 months now, and even though it is a project I love, I want to finish it sometime this summer. Partly because writing it is has been diffficult and tiring. Mostly because many consider summer to be “Prime Time” for readers, and Reunion: Coda is – in my opinion – perfectly suited to be read at the beach or during a vacation. I hope that I can release this book at a time when most folks are looking for something new to read. So if I want to do that by July or early August, I must finish the manuscript by late June.
Thus, if I want to meet that deadline, I must avoid long pauses between the end of writing one chapter and starting the next.
I will try to play the “What Happens Next?” game after lunch today, even though I don’t know how much – or how little – I will have to revise the final scene of The Breathless Hush of Evening.
As the old 1970s and ‘80s Polaroid TV commercials used to say, “We’ll see what develops.”
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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