A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2026 Alex Diaz-Granados   Yesterday I kicked off a brand‑new project: And the Horse You Rode in On . It’s early days, but the energy feels right. This one has always insisted on being a novella — not a sprawling novel, not a short story stretched thin — just a novella that knows exactly what it wants to be. The setting drops us into the mid‑1970s, a time that’s warm, textured, and perfect for what the story needs. And without spoiling anything, the heart of this tale is about how Jim and Mark become fast friends. Not the later chapters of their lives, not the adult complications — just the spark that starts it all. The writing is flowing smoothly, scene after scene arriving with that welcome sense of momentum. After a stretch of feeling blocked, it’s a relief to be moving again. If you haven’t yet explored Jim’s world, this is a great moment to dive into the four existing stories — especially The Jim Garraty Chronicles . That omnibus gathers the emotional backbone of J...

© 2026 Alex Diaz-Granados   A Hardcover, Finally After a fair amount of wrestling with KDP’s settings, templates, and mysterious page‑count limits, The Jim Garraty Chronicles will soon be available as a hardcover. I had to change the trim size because the book crossed the 550‑page threshold, and that change forced me to rebuild the cover from scratch. Not exactly the smoothest process, but the end result looks surprisingly good. The hardcover collects all four stories — Reunion , Reunion: Coda , Comings and Goings , and the bonus origin story, The Summer of Two Movies . Seeing them bound together on cream paper, with a proper spine and a clean layout, gives the whole project a sense of permanence I didn’t expect. It feels like the right way to present Jim Garraty’s early years. For the author photo, I went with a picture from my college days, taken when I received a journalism award. It seemed fitting to use an image from the time when writing first became part of my identit...

  The Song That Wouldn’t Leave: How “Somewhere” Became Jim and Marty’s Emotional North Star Every writer has experienced it: the moment when a first‑draft choice plants itself in the soil of the story and refuses to be uprooted. You tell yourself you’ll revisit it later. You assume you’ll refine it, replace it, elevate it. But when “later” arrives, the choice is still there — stubborn, insistent, quietly correct. That’s what happened with Somewhere . When I drafted the 1998 version of Jim and Marty’s chorus‑room scene, I didn’t agonize over the song selection. I didn’t make a spreadsheet of musical options. I didn’t weigh thematic resonance or lyrical symbolism. I simply wrote Somewhere — almost casually — and moved on. And then, years later, when the real revisions began, I discovered something surprising. I couldn’t change it. Not because I lacked alternatives. Not because I was sentimentally attached to the draft. Not because I was afraid to revise. I couldn’t cha...