Late Morning/Early Afternoon, Sunday, June 16, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire
Hello, everyone. It’s a cool – even chilly by my Florida native standards – early summer day in my corner of New England. As I write this, the temperature is 65°F (19°C) under sunny skies. With the wind blowing from the south-southeast at 3 MPH (4 Km/H) and humidity at 38%, it feels like 77°F (25°C). Today’s forecast calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 74°F (24°C). Tonight, the skies will be partly cloudy. The low will be 54°F (11°C).
Weekend Update, Part the First: A (Somewhat) Productive Saturday
I tend to give my novel a break on the weekend. Crafting – or attempting to craft – a fictional story for a few hours a day is hard and draining, so relaxing on Saturday and Sunday makes sense.
However, sometimes even common-sense rules must be broken if the circumstances demand it. And because this week’s writing output was, shall we say, disappointing, especially on Friday, I broke the “no work on the novel on weekends” rule yesterday.
At least for a while, anyway.
Like I told you before, Friday was a disaster for my writing. I felt drained. I couldn’t concentrate. I was running late. And I was annoyed.
As a result, I didn’t add a single word or make any revisions to the manuscript. Even the new scene I wrote on Thursday to kick off Chapter 18 was left untouched.
So when I woke up yesterday, I was determined to make up for the lost workday. I didn’t care that it was Saturday. I had no plans for the day, anyway, and after having breakfast and stepping outside for a brief interval, I felt re-energized and wanted to work, even if it was just for an hour or so.
(There was another motive behind my desire to toil away yesterday: I have a summer deadline for Reunion: Coda and every wasted day of work pushes it further back.)
Sometimes It Pays Off to Work on a Weekend…
So, yesterday morning, I shared my haiku with you on this blog, and then I switched to the Microsoft Word file with the manuscript. I went down to the start of Chapter 18, glanced at it, and assessed the good and the bad. Then I spent an hour and a half polishing and improving it, mainly by spicing it up with sensory details and sorting out some small problems in the first draft.
Fortunately, the new scene had more good elements than bad ones. As a result, I didn’t end up working all day, and I was free to take the rest of the day off to play Regiments and watch videos on YouTube.
The novel is not happening today. The clock is ticking, and I’m drawing a blank on what to do with Scene Two. But if you want to know how Reunion: Coda is coming along, here are some fresh numbers:
- Number of Chapters: 18 (17 completed, 1 underway)
- Number of Pages: 393
- Number of Words: 99,163
You might think I have a word quota to fill with these sporadic updates since I’m nearing the 100,000-word milestone. But that’s not the case. I don’t care about the number of words; I care about the quality of the story and the joy of publishing my first novel (by myself) this year. I’m only writing what’s essential, and I hope the final book will satisfy the fans of Reunion: A Story who wanted more of Jim Garraty’s adventures.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
You must be logged in to post a comment.