Musings & Thoughts for Friday, May 17, 2024, or: Reunion: Coda Gets a New Scene for a New Chapter

Late Morning/Midday, Friday, May 17, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, everyone. It’s late morning here on a spring day in my remote corner of northern New England. Currently, the temperature is 71°F (22°C) under partly sunny conditions. With humidity at 57% and the wind blowing from the northeast at 8 MPH (13 Km/H), the feels-like temperature is 79°F (26°C). Today’s forecast calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 73°F (23°C). Tonight, we can expect partly cloudy skies. The low will be 50°F (10°C).

On Writing & Storytelling: Making Some Progress with Reunion: Coda…Finally!

After getting stuck in the dreaded “In-Between Chapters Doldrums” that I almost always end up in when I finish a chapter, I finally started the 17^th chapter of Reunion: Coda.  It took me a while; I sat at my desk around 2 PM after my usual midday break, but I didn’t type the first usable line to In the Light of Day, the first scene of the chapter titled “That Moment Divine”until 3:00 PM. (I’d tried several opening lines for the scene, but none worked until inspiration struck and I decided to focus on what Jim would see upon waking up “the morning after” his first time with Maddie.

It’s been a while since my “first time” but I decided to draw on my memories of that occasion and its own “morning after” to come up with this beginning (adapted, of course, for Reunion: Coda’s characters and situations):

Jim Garraty’s Apartment – 10:30 AM EST

The morning light spills lazily through the bedroom window, its pale glow a gentle herald of the late morning hour. It’s 10:30 AM in New York City, and the cool, partly cloudy skies hint at the cusp of spring’s gentle warmth. Despite the decent hour, a sense of drowsy contentment lingers; the kind that follows a night spent awake until the small hours — 2:30, maybe 3 AM — lost in the kind of intimate fun that makes one forget the time. I’m half-awake, the remnants of sleep still clinging to me like a cherished memory, but the sight of Maddie, mere inches away, compels my eyes to open fully. She’s slipping into her panties and shrugging on her pink bathrobe, tying its sash loosely around her waist, the movements fluid and familiar in the shared quiet of the room.

Of course, this is the second, revised version of the opening “graf.” The first draft conveyed the same tableau, but it wasn’t well thought out and I had to rewrite it to remove inconsistencies and add some necessary sensory details.

The rest of the scene didn’t need to be rewritten much, at least not from my perspective, and it ended up being a “short and sweet” opening to the new chapter. As it stands, In the Light of Day consists of 566 words – three pages’ worth of copy – and it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, so – at least till my Beta Reader weighs in on it – I don’t need to worry about it and can move on to Scene Two.

Today I will try to build on the foundation I laid yesterday and work on Scene Two. I don’t know how successful I’ll be; I woke up earlier than usual (at 5:30 AM), and even though I had a reasonably good breakfast, I’m groggy and slow of thought now. I’ll do my best to get re-energized during the midday break and get some writing done when I return to my desk. If I can write today, fine. If not…there’s always Monday, or even part of the weekend if I feel up to working on the novel.

That’s all for now, folks. I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into my writing process and the challenges I face as a fiction writer. I appreciate your feedback and support, so feel free to leave a comment or share this post with your friends. Have a good Friday and a nice weekend, and keep reading and writing!