On Writing & Storytelling: Editing and Revising ‘Reunion’ – It’s Not Over Until the Last (Egregious) Mistakes Are Corrected

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On!’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” ― Calvin Coolidge

Late morning, Friday, July 7, 2023 – another hellishly scorching summer day in the Tampa Bay area. Currently, the temperature outside is 86°F/30°C under mostly sunny conditions, but the heat index is 94°F/35°C. The high for today is expected to reach 92°F/33°C. If the forecasters are right about today’s weather outlook, things might cool down in the afternoon if we get some rain showers around noon, but this being the subtropics, we could either get thunderstorms or, conversely, no rain at all. (Hillsborough County is huge, so even if Tampa or even Brandon – which is closer to Lithia still – see rain, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we will, too.)

The Never-Ending Saga of the Constant Updates Continues

As you know, I had hoped that when Wednesday’s batch of corrections to Reunion: A Story went live, I’d put this chapter in my writing career in the rear mirror of life. The novella is not that long – the “story” part is only 55 pages long (which is why I can’t issue a hardcover edition; it’s too short for that format to be commercially viable, according to Kindle Direct Publishing). Surely, after 25 years between the rough draft and the third edition, I’d have caught all the typos, spelling, and grammar “bloopers,” and formatting mistakes, no?

Well, since I’m still writing about the topic, the answer to that is a hard, apologetic “No.”  

See, I was checking my Kindle Fire tablet’s Books section (which is where all my Kindle titles, including the ones I’d purchased for my late mother during the brief two-year period that she enjoyed the Kindle I gave her in 2009 to compensate for her growing inability to read the small print in her paperbacks, are stored. (Mom didn’t have an Amazon account, so her Kindle – which I still have somewhere – was linked to my account instead.)

I just wanted to see if the Wednesday-night updates had been installed – I have the Kindle Fire set to receive updates as soon as I switch it on. And since I last looked at Reunion in my Kindle for PC app on the page where the most serious grammatical error occurred, that’s exactly where the Kindle Fire “opened” the revised version of Reunion.

To my chagrin, I noticed that even though my Kindle Fire now showed Reunion as being part of the Reunion Duology (proving that the updates were, indeed, live), the annoying mistake (I used a “past tense” dialogue attribution where a present tense one was required) was still there.

The other glaring – to me, anyway – mistake I noticed was less egregious; it “only” involved a typesetting glitch (somewhere along the line when I was uploading the Wednesday batch of “fixes” I accidentally changed the formatting for one paragraph (or “graf”) and failed to notice that when I was doing the quality check on the text on the KDP website. I saw what I expected to see, and not what was on the page in question.

Thankfully, I can use the Kindle Create app to make corrections and upload them to KDP, but…man, I’m tired of fixing things on Reunion, declaring victory, and then discovering that more corrections are necessary for X, Y, or Z reasons.

“Do the best you can, with what you can, while you can, and success in inevitable.” ― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

I sent the latest batch of corrections to KDP after 9 PM last night; I was advised (by email) that the updates went live for the Kindle edition at 11:01 PM; the ones for the paperback at 5:14 AM. Depending on many variables, Kindle edition owners should see the corrected version between noon today and Sunday morning. The paperback edition – which uses the same source file as the e-book – might be ready for orders between Saturday night and Monday morning.

Action This Day

I can’t say for sure what exactly I’ll do after I take a shower and get dressed once I publish this, my 1,169^th post on A Certain Point of View, Too. I’m stressing over both the constant updates to Reunion (Please, please…next time I look in my Kindle, I hope there are no glaring errors in the text that will make me look like I don’t give a damn about the quality of a reader’s experience with my book. I take pride in my work, and I think that if I expect you to buy my book, I should – in all fairness – offer you the best work I can in return.) and over the resulting slowdown of work on its sequel.

As a result of all that worrying, I did not sleep well last night (I fell asleep around 2 AM watching the Director’s Edition of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country), and I woke up just four and a half hours later. So…now I have a headache, a sore neck and back, and I’m both tired and irritable.

I had planned to work exclusively on Reunion: Coda today, and I still want to. But because my ability to write and make cool, rational, and effective editorial decisions depends on how I feel physically and emotionally, I can’t say, as I write this, whether I will be able to do anything constructive. After I publish this, I’ll take a longer-than-usual break, and when I come back to my desk, we’ll see what happens.