personal writing

As of last night there are three versions of the manuscript that will be used in the publishing of my book.

There is the ebooks manuscript, which has already been used to generate the product for Kindle devices (and I suppose any other ebook reader that comes about for whatever reason). It looks nice.

And then there are the other two manuscripts, which will be used respectively for the softcover and hardcover editions. And here is where some issues arose…

Hardcover books published by Amazon’s service are limited to 550 pages. The hardcover version of my manuscript is 490 or so pages. There is much more room, up to 820 pages, in the softcover format. My softcover manuscript is 404 pages. I had to do some serious gymnastics with fonts and spacing to get each version of the manuscript to fit.

Where is this going, you may be asking? ...

For three days this past fall my dog Tammy and I were trapped in a motel room in the North Carolina mountains. Hurricane Florence was thrashing the slats out of the state even that far inland. It was the two of us and the usual hurricane emergency supplies: cans of deviled ham, some crackers, a few six-packs of Coca-Cola… and not much to do.

So I began writing a short story.

In the past few months has come understanding of why I’ve never been able to crack that block in my mind toward writing narrative fiction. Yes, there have been the scripts for the various films(?) and other projects.

But anything like a smallish piece of prose? The connection couldn’t be made. Not until toward the end of this last summer, and maybe someday I’ll be able to talk about that.

Suffice it to say, so far I’ve written three

...

Book update: Three editions to choose from! And a bio pic.

“At The Crossroads”: An invitation to a short story