On Writing and Storytelling: The Elementary School That Wasn’t

Saturday, March 28, 2026 – Orlando, Florida

The Elementary School That Wasn’t

“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”
—Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

I woke up not long after 7 AM and booted up my computer to look at my various social media accounts, catch up on my WordPress statistics, and—most importantly—check my email for messages from Kindle Direct Publishing regarding the latest revision to my novel Reunion: Coda.

As I wrote in last night’s blog post, I was rereading the Prologue, trying to enjoy the story for its own sake, as though I weren’t the one who wrote it. I got through the first two vignettes—there are four in that section—and had just started the third (“The Last Afterschool Walk Home”) when I paused over this passage:

Mark wasn’t there that day in June of ’83 when I met Marty for the next-to-last time in the chorus room at South Miami High School. I don’t know what would have happened if he had walked in on us, on me and the girl I loved more than anything but was too chicken to tell her. But I know Mark, he’s been like a brother to me since we were kids at Kinloch Park Elementary, and he would have done something. He would have tried to make me confess my feelings to her before it was too late.

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with this paragraph. It’s not perfect, and maybe it could use a tweak here or there, but I wanted it to sound like Jim Garraty was telling a story, not writing one. I wasn’t aiming for English Composition 101; I was aiming for emotional honesty and an “oral history” vibe.

When I wrote that paragraph in spring 2023, I wasn’t familiar with Dade County Public Schools’ feeder patterns, attendance zones, or the geography of schools outside my own experience. I grew up attending schools in Southwest Senior High’s feeder system, so the only schools I knew from South Miami High’s orbit were West Miami Junior and South Miami Junior. I had no idea which elementary schools fed into SMSH.

So when I needed to establish which elementary school Jim and Mark attended in the mid-to-late 1970s, I chose “Kinloch Park” simply because it was a name I remembered hearing in high school. I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t know which high school it fed into. I just knew the name—and that it sounded “nice” in my mind’s ear.

I honestly can’t explain what prompted me—nearly three years after writing that section, and almost a year after the book’s publication—to suddenly investigate Kinloch Park Elementary’s location. Was it even in the South Miami/Kendall area? When did it open? Would Jim and Mark have attended it without their families needing to relocate later to fall within SMSH’s attendance zone?

Most readers outside South Florida wouldn’t think twice about these questions. But they mattered to me. So yesterday afternoon, I googled “Kinloch Park Elementary” and “South Miami Senior High feeder system,” only to discover that KPES isn’t anywhere near SMSH. This left me with two choices: retcon a pair of perfectly timed moves for Jim’s and Mark’s families, or simply change the elementary school’s name.

Naturally, I chose the simpler, cleaner solution: I swapped Kinloch Park Elementary for South Miami Elementary. No retcons. No contrived moves. No unnecessary complications in Jim and Mark’s backstory.

I made the change in the Kindle Create manuscript file and uploaded the revised version to Kindle Direct Publishing. You can’t just log in and tweak a published book directly; you must upload a new file for every format—Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. And because print editions require format-specific ISBNs, you often have to repeat the process more than once.

I submitted the Kindle edition first, then the paperback, and finally the hardcover after updating its ISBN to match KDP’s metadata. Less than an hour later, KDP emailed me to say the Kindle edition had passed QA and was back in the Kindle Store. The print editions followed early this morning: the hardcover at 6:34 AM, and the paperback 48 minutes later.

All three versions are now in Amazon’s pipeline, making their way through that familiar 72‑hour liminal space before the updated text appears for readers.

Conclusion: Why This Fix Matters

What struck me most about this tiny correction—this quiet swap of one elementary school for another—is how it reflects the deeper work of tending a fictional world. Yesterday we talked about this as an act of stewardship, not perfectionism. It’s about honoring the emotional physics of the Garratyverse, keeping the world coherent so the characters’ lives feel lived‑in rather than assembled.

Most readers will never know that Jim and Mark’s childhood school changed. But I will. And maintaining that internal logic, that sense of place and history, is part of the promise I make to anyone who steps into this story.

These small fixes are how I keep that promise.

And if you’ve been following this journey—from the first draft to the eighth revision to these quiet continuity corrections—I hope you can feel the same thing I do today: a sense of gratitude, a sense of momentum, and the quiet satisfaction of watching the forest come into focus, one tree at a time.