Waiting for My Paperback to Arrive

Saturday, July 18, 2026 – Orlando, Florida

I’m at my desk, because of course I am, on a brutally hot Central Florida afternoon, waiting for the Amazon Prime van like a kid watching for Santa’s sleigh.

Today’s delivery? My first paperback copy of The Jim Garraty Chronicles. I ordered it Thursday, the moment the paperback went live on Amazon—just one day after the omnibus edition of the Reunion Series arrived as a Kindle e-book.

I’m excited. No, scratch that—I’m ridiculously excited.

Unless you write books—or love them deeply—it’s hard to explain the thrill of holding your own work in print for the first time. It’s part pride, part disbelief, and part “wait, I actually made this?”

Naturally, because publishing likes to keep authors humble, my excitement comes with a tiny asterisk.

After The Jim Garraty Chronicles went live through Kindle Direct Publishing, I spotted a few minor—but deeply annoying—formatting glitches in the Reunion: Coda section. Nothing story-breaking, thank goodness. Just the kind of little layout gremlins most readers would glide right past.

I, however, am a former copy editor turned novelist. Gliding right past them was never in the cards.

So, yes, I spent much of Friday evening chasing down those pesky formatting gremlins and uploading fixes to Kindle Direct Publishing. I sent one corrected file after 7 PM, checked the Kindle browser preview, found a few more problems, muttered something unprintable, opened Kindle Create again, fixed those, and resubmitted the manuscript before 9.

Then came the good news. Amazon emailed me at 11:48 PM to say the omnibus was live as a Kindle e-book. At 3:49 this morning—while I was blissfully asleep—the paperback edition went live, too.

Right now, that first slightly imperfect copy of The Jim Garraty Chronicles is marked “Out for Delivery.” Will I notice the formatting flaws in Reunion: Coda the moment I open it? Absolutely. Will I order the cleaned-up version after the revisions process? Also absolutely.

But none of that changes the big thing: today, I get to hold my book.

And that feels pretty wonderful.

If you’re curious about The Jim Garraty Chronicles, the Kindle edition and paperback are now available on Amazon. No hard sell—just an invitation. If you pick up a copy and spend some time with Jim Garraty and the Reunion Series, I’d be grateful. And if the book speaks to you, an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads would mean a lot; reviews help other readers decide whether the story might be for them.