Early Afternoon, Thursday, January 2, 2025, Miami, Florida
Ah, January 1st – the magical day when people everywhere resolve to transform their lives, vowing to run ultramarathons, master the art of French pastry-making, and finally learn to speak Klingon fluently. By January 2nd, however, those grandiose ambitions often dissolve faster than the ink on a gym membership form that never sees the light of day.
As for me, I have but one humble resolution: to finish my novel. “Reunion: Coda in 2025″ is calling my name, and this year, come what may, I am determined to answer its call.
I have been working on the manuscript since early March of 2023, ever since I typed this paragraph on Word:
Some phrases just get under my skin. Take “Everything happens for a reason,” for example. It’s like nails on a chalkboard to me. It’s worse than “Think outside the box” or “At the end of the day…” – those overused phrases that you hear on TV all the time. It’s just a lazy way of saying something without really saying anything at all.
Back then, I honestly believed I would finish Reunion: Coda for a Holiday 2023 release on Amazon. I knew my protagonist, Jim Garraty, and some of his supporting characters well enough, and I had a good idea of how I would end the story I began long ago in Reunion: A Story. In the first few months of the writing process, I made great strides in advancing the tale of Jim, Mark, Marty, and Maddie.
What I didn’t count on, though, was that I’d be compelled to leave Florida for the unfamiliar and chillier environment of rural New Hampshire in December of 2023. The preparations for that move forced me to cease working on Reunion: Coda for almost two months. “Settling in” at my new home in Madison further delayed my return to work on the novel for a few more weeks as I acclimated to the new – and sadly unworkable – living situation there.
In the second week of January 2024, my writing productivity picked up again. I set up a nice little work routine: mornings were for blogging, followed by a two-hour lunch and rest break, then four hours spent on novel writing from Monday to Friday. Even though there were moments of writer’s block, I made great strides on Reunion: Coda and was hopeful it would be ready for the Winter ‘24 holidays.
But life threw me a curveball, and I ended up moving back to Miami. I tried to keep working on the novel during my last weeks in New Hampshire but had to take a break for almost two weeks while relocating to Florida along the Eastern Seaboard.
Thankfully, despite the relocations and life’s little detours, I’ve managed to write several complete chapters and even wrapped up a significant subplot since my return to Miami. Now, I believe I’m only a few chapters away from completing the main narrative. Sure, there’s the fine-tuning to consider, but I usually edit each chapter right after its first draft anyway, so I’m confident I’ll actually keep this New Year’s resolution.
Because, let’s be honest, if I can’t finish this novel, I might just start training for that ultramarathon. And nobody wants to see that—not even me.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
Comments
7 responses to “A Writer’s Resolve: Completing ‘Reunion: Coda’ in 2025”
I have to admit that it is hard to believe that you’ve been working on it since early March of 2023. It does not seem that long. On the other hand, being done by the holidays 2023 seems unrealistic even ignoring your moving adventures and the novel growing larger than originally planned. I have written a book but not a novel, but I know that that writing a novel requires a lot of skill and a lot of time and many moments of inspiration. It is a grand journey. I am looking forward to its completion but don’t rush to finish.
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The interesting thing is that I didn’t have a plan when I set out to write Reunion: Coda. Early on, I improvised the chapters set in early 2000, asking myself questions like, “OK, so Jim meets an attractive woman at a night club in Brooklyn who seems to like him. Now what?” The 1980s chapters were more or less carefully planned because they had to line up with the existing novella, whereas the more “recent” Jim-and-Maddie story slowly revealed itself to me as I went along. Since Jim’s high school days are (very loosely) based on mine, the chapters set in the 1980s almost wrote themselves.
(Not really…I still had to type them out one word at a time. But since that story’s arc was predetermined by what comes before in Reunion: A Story, the South Miami High chapters were easier to write. Ever since I had to focus solely on the Jim and Maddie relationship and its complications…the going has been slower because I only know how I want it to end but not quite sure how to get there.)
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I don’t how to, but I know that writing a novel is quite challenging. I wish you all the best with figuring this out. I wish you many creative ideas in the new year.
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Writing fiction is tougher than writing non-fiction. I only have one creative writing course under my belt, and I didn’t write any other short stories or novellas after I finished Reunion: A Story‘s original version back in ’98. So, the learning curve in writing a novel 25 years later has been…steep.
Thank you for the good wishes. I need a lot of encouragement and positivity as I embark on the final legs of this literary journey.
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Yes, I can certainly understand the steep learning curve.
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I thought writing Reunion: Coda would be like…I dunno…hiking through the countryside in moderately hilly terrain. I suppose that analogy works well for the chapters that are the prequel/continuation bits of the novel that tie in directly to Reunion: A Story. The standalone (Present Day/sequel bits), however, are like trying to climb Mt. Everest with only some knowledge of mountaineering.
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I don’t know anything about it, but that is roundabout what I’ve heard, the Mount Everest analogy.
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