A Friendly Reminder

Sunday, October 25, 2026 – Orlando,

Hi, everyone.

I just want to remind you that I’m not merely a Florida man with a blog. Actually, I have two blogs, since my original A Certain Point of View site on Blogger is still out there.

I’m also a working independent author with actual books to sell.

Let me be frank with you. I am, first and foremost, a storyteller.

I was apparently born with a certain amount of talent, and due to circumstances, that were largely beyond my control, writing eventually became the only realistic career choice I had. Fortunately, it was also the thing I wanted to do most.

I grew up in a family of readers, thinkers, and, yes, writers. I fell in love with the written word almost literally before I learned how to walk. Books were always around. Stories were always around. Writing, in one form or another, has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Or, put simply, this is the hand I was dealt when I was born 63 years ago, and I’m fortunate to be able to do what I do.

That doesn’t mean the economics are easy.

Between my regular Social Security payment and SSI, I receive slightly less than $1,000 a month. I’m fortunate that my landlady here in Orlando is far more reasonable about rent than my previous landlord in Miami was, but I’d still like to write to provide more than the occasional royalty payment.

In an ideal world, I’d like to sell enough books that I wouldn’t need public assistance at all. I’d like to have my own place someday. Back in Miami, preferably, although at this stage I’m willing to negotiate with the universe about the ZIP code.

I don’t dream of becoming a billionaire with a huge estate outside New York City and a summer home in Hawaii. That sort of luxury has never been my thing.

I’d settle quite happily for a nice two-bedroom apartment: one room to sleep in and another to write in. Add the ordinary amenities of a middle-class suburban neighborhood, decent Internet service, food in the refrigerator, and enough money left over that buying a Blu-ray or ordering a pizza doesn’t require a meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Nothing rural for me, thanks. Been there, done that.

My version of the American Dream is modest: financial stability rather than ostentatious wealth; affordable housing; food on the table; Internet access; the ordinary comforts of 21st-century life; and, perhaps someday, living conditions hospitable enough that a woman might actually want to share them with me.

I don’t think that’s asking for Trump Tower.

Let me pause here to acknowledge something longtime readers probably already know: I hate marketing.

I love writing books. I love talking about writing books. I can happily spend several thousand words explaining why Jim Garraty said one particular sentence in 1983.

Asking people to buy those books?

Suddenly I’m a twelve-year-old being told to sell magazine subscriptions door to door.

Nevertheless, storytelling is my livelihood as well as my vocation, so occasionally I have to put down the novelist’s hat, put on the extremely ill-fitting marketing hat, and remind people that these books do, in fact, exist.

But to get from here to there, I need to sell books.

Lots of books.

Certainly a lot more than I’ve sold since I published Save Me the Aisle Seat in April 2012.

So, again, a friendly reminder:

I have five books available on Amazon.

One, of course, is the aforementioned Save Me the Aisle Seat, a collection of movie reviews I originally wrote for the late, great Epinions.com review site.

I don’t promote that one very aggressively these days because, honestly, I don’t think it represents my best work anymore. I was a different writer then, and I hope I’m a better one now. Still, I haven’t unpublished it. Some readers enjoyed it and gave it good reviews, both on Amazon and, before the site shut down in 2014, on Epinions.

Besides, I’m not fond of rewriting history.

Save Me the Aisle Seat exists, warts and all. It was my first book. It marks an important point in my life as a writer. I’m not going to pretend it never happened merely because the Alex Diaz-Granados of 2026 would write some of those reviews differently.

And then there is Jim Garraty.

Oh, Jim.

I created the character almost four decades ago for a college creative-writing class, expecting him to help me earn a decent grade on an assignment. Instead, the guy apparently signed a long-term lease on some valuable real estate inside my head and refuses to move out.

There are now four published books in what I’ve come to call the Garratyverse.

First is Reunion: A Story, the novella that introduces Jim Garraty as a South Miami Senior High School student approaching graduation in 1983, hopelessly in love with Marty Reynaud and equally hopeless at telling her so. Fifteen years later, Professor Garraty is still living with the consequences of what he failed to say.

Then comes Reunion: Coda, the novel that took Jim’s story far beyond the place where I originally thought it ended. It transformed what I once quaintly called the “Reunion Duology” into something larger: a story about memory, friendship, regret, second chances, and what happens when you finally have to confront the past instead of merely remembering it. Amazon now describes the larger series as an exploration of connection, regret, and “the complicated beauty of second chances.”

The third book is Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen, a much more intimate story set in Boston in 1984. Jim is a Harvard freshman, homesick, lonely, and not exactly having the time of his life at a party when a young woman named Kelly Moore notices him standing by himself.

That encounter becomes a story about something I think almost everyone needs at some point in life: the experience of being seen. Not fixed. Not rescued. Just seen.

And finally, there is The Jim Garraty Chronicles: A Life Told in Four Movements, the omnibus edition.

That enormous beast collects Reunion: A Story, Reunion: Coda, and Comings and Goings, along with a bonus story, The Summer of Two Movies. The latter takes us back to 1977, when twelve-year-old Jim encounters A Bridge Too Far and Star Wars, two movies that, in very different ways, help shape the person he will eventually become. Amazon lists the Kindle omnibus at 684 pages, so if nothing else, you certainly get plenty of Jim Garraty for your money.

The omnibus also happens to be the fourth published book in The Jim Garraty Chronicles, which Amazon currently lists as a four-book series.

And, as Constant Readers of this blog already know, I’m not finished with Jim yet.

I’m currently writing And the Horse You Rode in On…, which will become the fifth Garraty book when it is finished and published. This one goes farther back than any of the others, to Jim’s preteen years in mid-1970s South Miami and the beginning of his friendship with Mark Prieto.

Which means the college assignment that I merely hoped would get me a decent grade has somehow turned into the fictional record of one man’s life stretching across decades.

Prof. Schroeder gave me a B+.

Apparently, Jim Garraty thought I deserved extra credit.

So here comes the sales pitch, such as it is.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while and enjoy the excerpts I post, or if my stories about Jim, Marty, Kelly, Maddie, Mark, memory, love, friendship, missed opportunities, and second chances have made you curious, please consider giving one of the books a try.

You don’t have to buy the whole series. You don’t have to buy the biggest hardcover available and build a shrine to Jim Garraty in your living room.

One book will do.

And if you’ve already read one and enjoyed it, a review helps. Telling a friend about it helps. Recommending it to somebody who enjoys character-driven fiction helps.

Independent authors don’t have massive advertising departments behind us. We mostly have our stories, our readers, word of mouth, and the stubborn belief that somewhere out there is another person who might connect with something we wrote.

Maybe that person is you.

Yes, selling more books would improve my material circumstances. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’d like greater independence. I’d like a place of my own. I’d like a little more freedom and a little less anxiety about money.

But there’s another reason I want people to read my work.

Stories are meant to be read.

I can write Jim Garraty stories until the cows come home, or until Jim finally starts paying me rent for all the space he occupies in my head, whichever comes first. But the process isn’t complete until someone on the other side of the page meets these people.

That’s ultimately what I want.

Not a mansion.

Not a yacht.

Not my name on a skyscraper.

Just a comfortable place to live, enough financial security to keep doing the work I love, perhaps someone special to share that life with someday…

…and enough readers wondering what happens next that I have an excuse to keep telling stories.

I think I can live with that version of the American Dream.

And if buying one of my books helps me get there?

Well…

consider this your friendly reminder.