On Writing and Storytelling: The Back-to-Work Monday Blues

Monday, June 8, 2026, Orlando, Florida

Hi, everyone.

It’s another steamy summer day in Central Florida, which means the sun is once again auditioning for the role of tyrannical overlord. I’ve already rescued the mail from the curbside mailbox, so I can now spend the rest of the workday indoors, where the air‑conditioning—and my better judgment—live.

I plan to spend at least two hours on The Jim Garraty Chronicles. I still expect to release it later this year, although at the moment the project and I are in one of those “it’s complicated” phases. Most of my time is going into fixing the subheads in the omnibus’s Reunion: Coda section—a small task in theory, a stubborn drain on patience in practice.

Kindle Create is very much a finishing tool, not a writing environment. It can take a Word manuscript and help turn it into something polished and readable for Kindle or print, which is genuinely useful. But when it comes to certain formatting details—subheadings, in particular—it has all the charm and flexibility of a mildly irritated parking meter.

So yes, I will approach this afternoon’s work with roughly the same enthusiasm I once brought to sixth‑period Algebra I in 12th grade: dutifully, grimly, and with a strong desire to be somewhere else. The issue isn’t that fixing the capitalization glitches is hard. It isn’t. It’s just what my childhood best friend Mark Prieto would have called a “huge time suck”—necessary, perhaps, but not exactly the sort of thing that makes one leap from bed singing.

Still, once I finish taming the subheadings in Reunion: Coda, I can finally move on to the omnibus’s front and back matter, which feels much closer to actual bookmaking and much less like clerical penance. I’ve already fixed the subheadings in Reunion: A Story and Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen; those pieces were shorter and more streamlined, so they demanded less wrangling.

That next stage should be more interesting. I need to write an introduction for the omnibus—something that explains how these works speak to each other, and perhaps why gathering them under one cover feels right to me now. I’m also toying with the idea of asking a long‑standing friend and reader to contribute a foreword, which could give the book an added note of warmth and perspective, assuming I can make the request without sounding like I’m assigning homework.

I also plan to add an omnibus‑specific afterword, since a collected edition seems to invite a little retrospective honesty. As for the 2024 interview Thomas Wikman did with me about Reunion: Coda, I’m still undecided. It may earn its place in the back matter, or it may not; I’ll know better once I see how the rest of the volume comes together.

In any case, if you’re new to these books, the three individual titles are already available on Amazon. And if you’ve read one—or all—of them, a review is always appreciated more than authors probably say often enough, if only because we try not to sound needy before noon.