On Writing & Storytelling: or, Gratitude, Revisions, and ‘Reunion’

A Generous Act of Friendship

“Always remember people who have helped you along the way, and don’t forget to lift someone up.” ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

Well, here we are on Friday, March 17, 2023, on the cusp of another weekend. It’s also St. Patrick’s Day, though at the moment I am not wearing anything green. I’ve been up since just after sunrise, which today was at 7:36 AM Eastern Daylight Time, and even though I had breakfast, I’m still a bit sleepy and tired.

I noticed earlier that my friend and fellow former Epinions reviewer, Thomas Stig Wikman, posted a cover reveal post for my recently revised and re-published novella, Reunion: A Story.

That was a lovely and generous gesture of support on Thomas’ part; he is on vacation and didn’t have to do that. But he is a good friend – even though he and I have never met in person, we’ve known each other from the time when we used to write consumer reviews for the now defunct site Epinions.com back in the ‘00s – and he is a loyal fan of Reunion.

I am grateful for Thomas’ championing of my novella; we self-published authors – at least the ones who can’t afford to pay for Amazon/Kindle Direct Publishing’s “premium” marketing services – must rely on self-promotion and/or “word of mouth” buzz from satisfied readers, either in written online reviews or by in-person recommendations to friends and family.  

Both Thomas’ “cover reveal” post and his earlier review of Reunion mean the world to me, and I’m forever grateful.

“We must find time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives.” ― John F. Kennedy

Thomas is not only a fellow ex-pat from Epinions and blogger, but also an author in, as John Lennon might have put it, “his own write.”

Last July, he published – through Thebes Press – a lovely book about his beloved Leonberger dog, Bronco. It’s titled The Life and Times of Le Bronco von der Löwenhöhle: Stories and Tips from Thirteen Years with a Leonberger. As a reader and a guy who loves dogs, I enjoyed this entertaining and informative book about Bronco, the Wikman family’s big (and big-hearted) canine companion immensely. I reviewed it here, but if you want a quick recommendation now, I’ll just say: Buy a copy! It’s money well spent!

Reunion: A Story Revisions Update

It’s been a week since I started the protracted – and sometimes vexing! – process of revising Reunion. When I started last Friday afternoon, I thought that it was just going to be a quick “in and out” session on Kindle Create (the app that Kindle Direct Publishing created not too long ago to help us writers self-publish on Amazon a bit more “easily”); after all, I just needed to add a couple of items to the book’s “front matter” and make a few teensy-weensy changes to the text.

Um. No. Not quite.

While it’s true that I did not have to rewrite Reunion from start to finish, I found more typos, weird turns of phrase, and inconsistencies in formatting that I’d missed when I first decided to publish (after 20 years) my first serious attempt at fiction.

I’ve written elsewhere about this, so I’m not going to rehash the whole sorry saga of the second revised edition. All you need to know is that because every time I thought I had spotted – and corrected – a typo, weird turn of phrase, or bad formatting, and thought I was done, I kept on finding more of them even after Amazon had accepted one batch of “fixes.”

Of course, the copy editor (and reader) in me didn’t like those goofs in the story, so I ended up working on Reunion until the wee hours of Tuesday, March 14. As a result, all those uploads to Amazon’s servers gummed up the works, so to speak, and the final edits are only now beginning to go “live.”

I did notice that the new cover is featured on the Barnes and Noble website; in case you don’t want to risk getting a paperback copy with the 2018 edition, I suggest you order from B&N instead. (Since the Kindle edition seems to be upgrading the content of the e-book edition faster, I know that the edits are taking hold.)