On Stories & Storytelling: The Second Revised Edition of 'Reunion' is Now Live on Amazon Kindle

Image by Pexels via Pixabay

  

I’m writing a quick post to let my Blogger readers know that I spent much of the weekend doing some revisions to Reunion: A Story, which is my first (self) published work of fiction and is available now on Amazon as either a Kindle e-book or a Print-on-Demand paperback.

Synopsis

 

I even changed the cover art for the Kindle edition. 

It is June 1983. Jim Garraty is a senior at South Miami Senior High. He's a staff writer for the school paper, a college-bound scholar who plans to become a historian and author of books on military history. He's well-liked by his peers and teachers, and his future looks bright.

But as commencement draws near for the Class of 1983, Jim must deal with unfinished business. The girl he loves from afar is also graduating, and rumor has it that she is going away for the summer before starting college in the fall. Worse still, Marty doesn't know how deeply Jim's feelings for her are - unless he tells her.

But when an opportunity arises on the last day of classes at South Miami High, Jim hesitates...and the window of opportunity closes.

Now, 15 years later, James Garraty is an up-and-coming history professor whose literary career is on the rise. Respected by his fellow faculty professors and recipient of popular and critical acclaim, Jim seems to have it all. Except for one thing. True love.

A Brief History of ‘Reunion: A Story’

 

There's even a table of contents! 

I wrote Reunion in 1998 – a quarter of a century ago – just to see if I could write a believable story about love, loss, regret, and friendship. I used part of an old creative writing assignment from college – “Write either a flashback or a dream sequence.” – as a starting point (I actually incorporated a lot of the stuff I wrote in 1987 into the 1998 material, so I can honestly say I began writing Reunion in 1987!) and expanded it outward until it became what it is today – a 41-page (on Kindle) novella (or superlong short story?).

After I finished the original version in ’98, I showed it to my mother, my half-sister, and a few others. They liked it, and so did I, but since I didn’t want to navigate the complicated pathway to getting it published the traditional way, I didn’t do much with Reunion.

I did save the original Word file and transferred it to newer versions of Microsoft Office every time I upgraded or had to replace “dead” home computers. Now it’s in the “cloud,” so I don’t need to send .docx files to myself via email. Still, I didn’t do anything with Reunion until I decided, in the summer of 2018, to self-publish it through Amazon.

Revising and Republishing ‘Reunion’

 

And here's one of the reviews from Amazon. I chose that one from the retailer's site because it doesn't have spoilers and yet captures the spirit of Reunion.

Although Reunion is a delightful story – the 10 reviews on its Amazon page are all 5-star positive – and has earned me some royalties, it was far from flawless. I published it in July of 2018, nearly 20 years after I originally wrote it, but even though I ran it through spellchecking and grammar checks on Word, it still had flubs that Word is not “trained” to catch or correct. There were other issues that I wasn’t aware of but needed correcting.

I’ve written elsewhere about how I spent most of the weekend working on revisions and making sure that the story is as good as I can make it, so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that, to my satisfaction, anyway, Reunion has been revised, copy-edited, and “fixed” to the best of my ability.

Whether you have a first edition copy but would like the definitive (and more professional-looking) version of Reunion, or if you are a potential first-time reader, you can order the second revised version on Amazon or any of its overseas branches.

Prices for the U.S. edition are:

• $3.99 for the Kindle e-book
• $6.99 for the paperback