I had an idea to write a Valentine's Day chapter. There is an old, unused scene from 1984 in my folders. It was a Valentines gone bad story that I mostly deleted from ATYP. I left a bare bones mention of Joe's mistake on that holiday in whatever chapter that was. I began rewriting days before the 14th, hoping to deliver a short story to the punks readers group.
I failed.
As I wrote, I realized I only had a long scene, not nearly enough to work with and not enough time to do it right from scratch. Dirty Valentine is now in the NYC book that is currently running on Wattpad. I gave Joe a better outcome in the new version.
There are 30 NYC chapters loaded up in my Wattpad queue, one per day into March. I am done rewriting, checking, and editing All The Young Punks 2025. My Grammarly to ProWritingAid transition is complete and I've learned some things with certainty. I loathe AI writing tools, and I hate the fact that I need them. They are so fucking intrusive! Believe it or not, ProWritingAid may be worse than Grammarly.
I feel there's an artificial intelligence bitch blog is coming soon.
Combined, the Providence and New York story is 58 chapters. My focus now shifts to Postcards, my favorite writing to date. I went through the postcards from New Orleans through Costa Rica, mostly corrections but also some rewriting. Those chapters are queued up in Wattpad. Postcards will begin publishing a few days after NYC ends. That book will run into April.
I reduced chapter lengths in NYC. That and some new rewriting added six chapters. Postcards will get a different treatment. I will not be reducing that work to shorter chapters. Each is a unique short story with new locale and characters. I can't break them up, mash them together, or swap scenes around.
I like Postcards as it is with one exception - #16, Postcard From Patagonia. I recently wrote somewhere that Joe's reaching the end of the world was almost anti-climactic. I attributed that to the lack of young women in Ushuaia. Maybe it was a lack of imagination on my part. Patagonia is the longest chapter. Breaking that into two parts will allow me to expand on Joe's Tierra del Fuego experience. There may be more Santos in that postcard. I'll be working on that soon.
I've been bouncing between postcards and the future fifth punks book, City Of Angels. That story has undergone significant changes even as the baseline tale of Joe and Tina's extra-marital affair is the main plot. There are new punks chapters in the 1990s timeline. I wrote standalone reunion chapters, like postcards, where Joe travels to see old friends. There are new characters and sub-plots and reimagined scenes, like Dirty Valentine, mixed into the old.
I believe blending these new chapters and sub-plots into the old story gives us (the writer and readers) a break from the five-year bi-coastal affair story, which is admittedly long - five years! I like what I've done thus far.
While rewriting early postcards, I began making mental notes of the story edits I was making, because there weren't any major changes. Today, while working on the Costa Rica story with Sofie and the colonizers, I concluded the vast majority are dialogue changes and many of those are new jokes.
I never use the story tags for comedy or humor in my work. Some days I feel I should, but I always balk at those tags. I feel if you label something comedy, it better be damn funny. Of course, there's a lot of ball breaking in my punks writing and plenty of jokes. The story itself is not comedy.
As I read my old scenes with fresh eyes, new ideas strike and some are pretty damn good. It's often a snappy comeback or smart ass comment. On some dialogue changes, I've wondered, 'Why the fuck didn't I think of this last year?'
I reached another conclusion in this rewrite that contradicts something I said previously. The sex scenes belong in the cheating chapters. At some point, I'll write about that in this blog, but the short story is, I'm not slashing nearly as much erotic content as I first suggested and I have a good reason.
So, chapter 19 of NYC dropped today. Eleven more remain. Then Postcards and Venice will run back to back. In May, I must decide if I will publish City Of Angels or take a punks break and publish a crime story.
When Postcards launches in two weeks, I'll send an email with a link to the punk readers' group. This blog has a view counter. These random ramblings get far fewer views than the emailed links. I have a few unsent blogs I wrote and then thought, who gives a fuck?
So, this month I've focused on writing fiction, not my musings.