Wednesday, July 8, 2026 – Orlando, Florida
Happy Hump Day, dear readers!
Well, here we are at midweek, and my little corner of Central Florida has apparently been set to “steam-clean.” As I write this, it is a torrid 92°F (33°C) under mostly sunny skies, with a heat index of 104°F (40°C)—the kind of number that makes even the mailbox look like a bad life choice. I spend most of the day safely indoors in an air‑conditioned house, but I do have to venture out for the mail and the trash bin. Every time I step out, it feels less like going outside and more like entering a furnace with landscaping.
In technical terms: yikes.
Now that I’ve returned to my desk, hydrated and only lightly broiled, here’s a quick update on what I’m up to in Orange County, Florida.
The Jim Garraty Chronicles – The Omnibus Continues
Of all my Garratyverse projects, the omnibus I started last fall is the one least likely to make my muse sit up and ask for coffee. So far, it isn’t about creating anything new; it’s literary housekeeping—necessary, dusty, and about as glamorous as reorganizing a sock drawer. Kindle Create is a decent tool for turning manuscripts into e‑books and print editions through Kindle Direct Publishing. It behaves well as long as the manuscript doesn’t contain too many page elements.
Body text? Fine. Chapter titles? Great. Title pages? No problem. Subheadings? That’s when Kindle Create starts chewing the furniture.
Most of my regular readers already know this saga. I first ran into the problem in 2023 while revising Reunion: A Story for the first time since its 2018 publication, and that book is short compared with its more ambitious follow‑up, Reunion: Coda. I’ve written about Kindle Create’s subheading shenanigans many times, so I’ll just say that redoing Coda’s section of The Jim Garraty Chronicles is not a task I look forward to. It’s not as hard as solving an algebra problem (which I can’t do), but it’s not as fun as writing fresh material. As a result, progress is slow—painfully so.
This week, however, I’ve managed to correct the subheadings in five chapters—a modest but welcome improvement. I always tell myself that fixing subheadings isn’t that hard, and objectively that’s true. All I have to do is highlight the offending page element, replace Subheading with Chapter Subtitle, and voila! Kindle Create’s pesky habit of capitalizing every word in a subheading is overridden. Why this happens, I have no idea. I’m a writer, not a programmer. If I knew how to fix the underlying code, I’d probably be living in a house with central air that doesn’t sigh dramatically every time it turns on.
If I didn’t get bored with this task, let myself wander off after every passing distraction, or privately suspect that demand for a single‑volume Garraty collection is not exactly clogging the switchboards, I’d probably be making faster progress. As it is, an ambitious snail could draft, revise, and publish an entire series before I finish The Jim Garraty Chronicles. I tend to dawdle when the work is dull and the cheering section is, shall we say, intimate.
That said, I am not a quitter. Somewhere out there, perhaps, is a reader who has been waiting for the Chronicles with the quiet patience of a monk and the purchasing power of a Kindle account.
Hope, after all, springs eternal—even in this humidity.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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