On Writing and Storytelling: The Battle of the Subheadings Rages On….

Wednesday, April 8, 2026 — Orlando, Florida

It’s another gloomy, blustery spring day in Central Florida, the kind that can’t decide whether it wants to be dramatic or just mildly annoying. As I write this, the temperature is hovering one degree shy of the forecast high of 70°F (21°C). Yesterday’s mix of stiff breezes and light rain has returned for an encore performance. With gray skies, 90% humidity, and a northeast wind that keeps shoving at 10 MPH (16 km/h), this Wednesday has fully committed to being a soggy, slightly exasperated Hump Day.

Despite my low enthusiasm yesterday, I did manage to wrestle a few more subheadings into submission in The Jim Garraty Chronicles. Four or five of them, I think—just enough progress to feel productive before clocking out of the afternoon shift and moving on to household chores.

If Kindle Create weren’t so stubborn about formatting chapter titles, subtitles, and those pesky subheads, I’d probably be done “fixing” the Reunion: Coda section by now. I might even be tidying up the other two stories in the omnibus or drafting some front or back matter. But no—Kindle Create insists on overriding perfectly good Word formatting with its own baffling interpretation of capitalization rules. The programmers behind it may be brilliant coders, but somewhere along the way, the memo about “don’t mangle the author’s subheadings” must have gotten lost.

And because Reunion: Coda uses two braided timelines, those subheadings aren’t optional. They’re guideposts. Without them, readers would be wandering around the narrative like tourists who left their map in the rental car. So even though battling a supposedly helpful publishing tool every day is not my idea of creative bliss, I’m pushing on. I’ve been at this project since last October; I’m not about to let a rogue style sheet defeat me now.

In the meantime, if you’re curious about the world I’m wrangling into shape, the three published Garratyverse stories—Reunion: A Story, Reunion: Coda, and Comings and Goings: The Art of Being Seen—are all out there in the wild. If you’ve read one, thank you. If you’ve read all three, you have my eternal gratitude. And if you’re just now discovering Jim Garraty and his orbit of complicated, earnest, very human characters, I hope you’ll spend a little time with them. They’ve been good company for me, even on dreary Wednesdays like this one.