On Writing and Storytelling: Heat, Humidity, and the Great .kpf Rebuild

Saturday, April 18, 2026, Orlando, Florida

Hi there.

It’s a warm, bright spring day here in Central Florida. The temperature is sitting at 85°F (29°C) under sunny skies, with 55% humidity and a light southwest breeze at 2 MPH (4 km/h). Thanks to the humidity, the heat index is already up to 95°F (34°C). The forecast calls for mostly sunny conditions and a high near 90°F (32°C), so we’re firmly in “early summer preview” territory.

Now that I’ve reinstalled my writing tools — including Kindle Create — on this new computer, it’s time to turn back to the ongoing project of rebuilding the Garratyverse in the latest version of the app. That means revisiting Reunion: A Story, Reunion: Coda, and Comings and Goings: The Art of Being Seen, not just for The Jim Garraty Chronicles omnibus I was working on before my old Lenovo IdeaCentre died, but also for future editions of the individual titles.

Fortunately, all the manuscripts — including the newer flash‑fiction prequel The Summer of Two Movies — are safely stored in Microsoft’s cloud. I can pull them up from this PC or my backup laptop anytime. And because I’ve kept the text updated with every revision, the manuscripts match the current Amazon e‑book and print editions. So at least I’m not rewriting anything from scratch, especially the novel.

What I do wish is that Kindle Create offered cloud storage for its project files. When my previous IdeaCentre gave up the electronic ghost, it took all my .kpf files with it — the formatted projects for Reunion, Reunion: Coda, Comings and Goings, and the omnibus. The manuscripts survived, but the Kindle Create formatting did not.

So now I’m rebuilding everything from the ground up: four fresh Kindle Create projects — the three published Garratyverse stories plus the omnibus that will include The Summer of Two Movies. Each one needs to be reformatted to meet publishing standards again.

To reconstruct the omnibus, I’ll have to combine all four stories into a single Word document to serve as the new master file. It’s tedious, and definitely not how I wanted to spend my weekend, but it’s the only way forward if I want clean, consistent editions across formats.