Halfway Through the Heat: Notes From the Editing Trenches

Halfway Through the Heat: Notes From the Editing Trenches

Tuesday, March 31, 2026, Orlando, Florida

It’s a sultry, almost-summer spring day here in Central Florida. At the moment, it’s 80°F (27°C) under partly sunny skies. With the humidity sitting at 56% and an easterly breeze of 8 MPH (13 km/h), the heat index has already climbed to 89°F (31°C). Today’s forecast calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 82°F (28°C)—in other words, classic late-March weather in my corner of the Sunshine State.

With the final edits to the Kindle edition of Reunion: Coda now live, I’ve shifted my attention back to the corresponding section of The Jim Garraty Chronicles to ensure both versions of the novel remain consistent. Thankfully, I didn’t spend too much time exploring Jim’s childhood years in detail, and Kinloch Park Elementary only appears six times in the entire novel. If it had been mentioned more often, correcting that inconsistency would have been a far bigger headache. It’s frustrating enough that Kindle Create still struggles with something as basic as subheadings—having to fix my own narrative slipups on top of that only adds to the fun.

Every now and then, I’m tempted to scrap the Chronicles altogether and move on to And the Horse You Rode In On. But I keep going. Partly because I’ve already invested months of work into this omnibus, but mostly because—damn it—I want to publish it, and I want to read it myself, even if no one else ever does. As of today, I’d say The Jim Garraty Chronicles is about 50% complete: the four existing stories (Reunion: A Story, Reunion: Coda, Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen, and The Summer of Two Movies) are already loaded into the Kindle Create project, I’m currently editing Book II, and I still need to write most of the front and back matter that won’t simply be carried over from the individual titles.

I’ve already updated all references to Kinloch Park Elementary, replacing them with the more accurate “South Miami Elementary” in the Chronicles version of Coda. After my traditional afternoon rest break, I’ll return—reluctantly—to the tedious but necessary task of fixing those messy subheadings. I truly wish the folks who wrote the original Kindle Create code had included at least one actual author or, at minimum, a bona fide English major on the team. If they had, formatting chapter titles and subheads wouldn’t feel like such a Sisyphean chore. Better yet, the app would simply accept the formatting from Microsoft Word, which handles those literary housekeeping tasks far more gracefully.

Despite the frustrations—both self-inflicted and software-induced—I remain committed to seeing this project through. Every small correction, every tedious formatting fix, brings me closer to the version of The Jim Garraty Chronicles I’ve been carrying around in my head for years. And ultimately, the satisfaction of publishing a cohesive, well-crafted volume outweighs every annoyance along the way. I look forward to the day I can finally share the completed omnibus with readers—no matter how many, or how few, there may be.

If you’re curious about where Jim Garraty’s story begins, three of the individual titles—Reunion: A Story, Reunion: Coda, and Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen —are already out in the world via Amazon. They’re the foundation of the omnibus I’m building, and they offer a good sense of the emotional terrain I’m working to bring together. No pressure, just an open door.