A Writer’s Sunday Musings

Late Morning/Midday, Sunday, March 30, 2025, Miami, Florida

“Write the book you want to read but can’t find.” – Ilona Andrews

With the first scene of Reunion: Coda’s Chapter 30 written and included in the main manuscript, and the final scene safely tucked away in a separate document, I estimate that if all goes well, I’ll be done with the storytelling portion of the writing process by Wednesday at the earliest, Friday at the latest.

Right now, on this last Sunday of March 2025, the novel is 560 pages long, including the title and disclaimer pages. The word count is currently 136,441 words, which is quite an achievement for someone who was once worried about writing a 500-word English Comp essay. To be fair, it wasn’t the word count that bothered me; my hand cramps easily when writing in longhand, so I had to leave the classroom with my notetaker and dictate the essay out in a relatively quiet corridor on campus.

So far, I have resisted the urge to push ahead and work on Reunion: Coda over the weekend. As much as I want to finish the narrative and start working on those additional pieces – the dedication, afterword, acknowledgements, and other front and back matter – I know I need to take some time off. There are chores to attend to outside my writing life, and I truly need rest and distractions to recharge. Monday isn’t far away anyway, so I think it’s fine if I resist the novel’s siren call on this warm, cloudy, and humid Sunday in South Florida.

“Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

That’s all that I have for you, Dear Reader, so I’ll close this post here. See you around the galaxy!