Perfecting ‘Reunion: Coda’: The Editing Process Revealed

Afternoon, Friday, April 11, 2025, Miami, Florida

“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.” ― Truman Capote

Hi, everyone.

 Well, here we are on the last day of the workweek, and I’m still hard at work trying to make Reunion: Coda as captivating a reading experience as possible. Suppose you’ve never gone through the process of writing and self-publishing a long work of fiction or nonfiction. In that case, you can’t imagine how many errors, large or small, sneak into the manuscript file and remain hidden throughout the publication process. It’s pretty embarrassing when you receive word from Amazon that your book is published, you purchase it as an e-book, and suddenly all those gremlins emerge as typos, bits of repeated text, or – most frustrating to me – formatting errors caused by the way the Kindle Create app was coded, especially where subheads are concerned.

I’ve been hard at work updating my novel, ensuring it’s in the best shape possible. The latest round of corrections has been uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing for the hardcover edition. Once the next window opens, I’ll do the same for the Kindle version, and by tonight or tomorrow morning, I’ll update the paperback.

Even with all my efforts to catch and fix every misplaced subheading, missing separator, or typo, I know that sharp-eyed readers might still spot a slip or two. As a former copy editor, I find mistakes on the page—whether in my writing or someone else’s—almost physically painful to see. Back in my journalism days at what is now Miami-Dade College, my professor called me the best copy editor he’d ever taught, and my fellow editors on the student newspaper dubbed me the “Blue Slasher.” Armed with a non-photo blue pen, I would meticulously mark up the flats during pre-publication. I held my work to the same high standard I held everyone else’s, and that detail-oriented mindset hasn’t left me. Typos and literary slip-ups remain my sworn enemies, and I do my best to hunt them down in my writing.

Reunion: Coda deserves its time to shine, so I’m releasing the hardcover and paperback editions tomorrow—imperfections and all. If I kept chasing every last Literary Gremlin, I’d never let it go. Here’s hoping these final fixes bring us to a level of excellence we can all enjoy.