A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Well, here it is... Reunion: A Story (2nd Rev. Ed.) Photos by the author.  Nearly 40 years after my high school graduation... 37 years after I first wrote the dream sequence which became the foundation for Reunion.... And 25 years after I first cobbled Reunion together in my Miami bedroom while listening to the soundtracks from Titanic and Saving Private Ryan... The saga of Reunion: A Story is now complete.  Today, the paperback edition of the revised version of my novella arrived from Amazon, thus ending the nine-day-long process of fixing some issues that were present in the original 2018 edition. Both the Kindle and print editions are now in sync, plus Reunion now has a better, more story-centered cover., a Table of Contents, a copyright page, a new dedication, and an epigraph!  For a longer post on this topic, please go here!

The paperback edition's new cover. © 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados  After seven days of proofreading, revising, uploading fixes, and then waiting for the edits to “take,” the second edition of Reunion: A Story is live and available on Amazon as both a Kindle e-book or traditional paperback. It took longer than I expected, but that’s because I had to repeat the process several times; every time I thought, “Oh, good. Everything looks fine. I’m done,” I would wait till Amazon emailed me to let me know my book was “live” in Kindle Direct Publishing’s (KDP) servers and ready to order. I would then read Reunion, find more mistakes I’d missed on the previous copy-editing pass, unpublish the book from Amazon, and start over. Well, with all those uploads, one on top of the other, the updating slowed to a crawl, and the edits only appeared on the Kindle version in small increments and over a period of four days. The view from the Kindle Create app. Notice that it shows a preview of how Reunion

Image by  Sabrina  from  Pixabay    After working on the revisions and edits in the second edition of my novella Reunion: A Story, I will get to see the results of my weekend's labor later today. Sometime this afternoon, an Amazon Prime delivery van will drop off my copy of Reunion at the front door of the house where I live in Lithia. And shortly afterward, I will see for myself if the edits I made between last Friday afternoon and Monday night are present in the paperback edition.  Currently, the only place where I can see my revisions as I intend them to be read is the Kindle Create app I used to make them.  The view from the Kindle Create app. I had just finished reformatting the "song lyrics" (copy marked in boldface ) when I took this screengrab.  Amazon says that it takes up to 72 hours for revisions and other changes to make their way into the system. I made the last adjustments to Reunion  late on Monday night and early Tuesday morning, so those won't be seen

© 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and Kindle Create  Well, looks like as of tonight (March 13, 2023), the revisions I made this weekend to Reunion are "in the system and visible on Kindle, or at least on the online Kindle that is available on browsers via Amazon.  The revisions might have gone live as early as last night had I not kept noticing more small, hard-to-spot mistakes in my first published work of fiction. The goofs were so tiny and scattered throughout the 41-page novella (or long short story) that they didn't jump out at me right away when I first re-read Reunion on Kindle back in 2018. I was spurred into action after I received an email from my former journalism prof at Miami-Dade Community College, letting me know that he liked the book — he obviously bought it a little while ago — but that he had spotted a few things that needed fixing.  Of course, I went into copy editor mode and spooled up my Kindle Create app to make the corrections and revisions. First, my former jo

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.

Screenshot from Movie Magic Screenwriter 6 showing dialogue from Happy Days Are Here Again. © 2019 Alex Diaz-Granados Hey, there, Constant Reader! Welcome to another edition of Bloggin' On, the no-reviews, no-politics zone of A Certain Point of View where I talk about (or, if you're literal about such things, write about ) topics that do not fit neatly into those categories. Today is Friday, January 17, 2020, which by coincidence is the 29th anniversary of the start of Operation Desert Storm (the U.S.-led military campaign to liberate Kuwait from its Iraqi occupation) back in 1991. It's already early afternoon here in my corner of Florida, and it's a nice day outside. Presently the temperature is a mild 77℉ (25℃) under mostly sunny skies; the forecast for the area says that's as warm as it will get today, and the low is expected to reach 62℉ (17℃). For those of you who are following the progress of Happy Days Are Here Again, Juan told me yesterday that he

A glimpse at a part of my Blu-ray collection, courtesy of my member page at Blu-ray.com. Some of the movies I own in 2019 were ones that I bought for Mom during her last four years; I kept them for sentimental reasons.  Hello and welcome once again to Bloggin' On, the "blog-within-a-blog" section of A Certain Point of View. It's Tuesday, November 25, and as I write this it is mid-afternoon here in my corner of Florida. The weather outside is nice, right now it's mostly sunny and the temperature is 72℉ (22℃); the low is expected to reach 51℉ (10℃) tonight, but I don't foresee myself venturing outside for any reason. I should at least try to sit out on the front porch with a book and get a bit of fresh air and sun, but I don't have any desire to do so. A little while ago I saw on my Amazon account that the home media release of  It: Chapter Two is available for pre-order, so I did that. Warner Bros. is dropping the various videodisc (Blu-ray, 4K UHD

Image Courtesy of NaNoWriMo Greetings! Welcome to another edition of A Certain Point of View, the blog that I started almost nine years ago. This is the 1,213th post overall and the 395th for 2019. Back in January, I resolved that I'd have at least 365 posts written and posted by December 31; now it looks like I'll end the year with a minimum of 400 posts, perhaps even 430, if I don't slack off for the rest of November and write at least one post a day in December. Anyway, it's Friday, November 22, and it looks like it's going to be a cool autumn day here in my corner of Florida. According to my Weather app, it's 70℉ (21℃) outside under sunny skies; the forecast high is expected to reach 77℉ (25℃), with some cloud cover moving in later this afternoon. Today is also the 56th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald. I was only eight months old at the time so, naturally, I don't have any recollect

How do you come up with writing ideas? It depends on the circumstances, really, as well as my current state of mind. As it stands, other than my blog and my answers on Quora, I can point to three things that I have written for public consumption: Save Me the Aisle Seat: The Good, the Bad and the Really Bad Movies: Selected Reviews by an Online Film Reviewer: Alex Diaz-Granados: 9781475075045: Amazon.com: Books Reunion: A Story: Mr. Alex J Diaz-Granados: 9781722120474: Amazon.com: Books Each of these projects had a unique “point of origin.” The oldest of these is  Reunion: A Story.  Although I self-published it last summer, it began life as a creative writing assignment in my sophomore year in college, circa 1987. I don’t remember what the assignment was now, but I do remember that I wrote a dream sequence set during the protagonist’s last day as a high school senior. It only earned a B, but I kept it in my college work files with the intention of  maybe  rewor

© 2017 Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) From what I understand, the rules for being allowed to write published and canonical  Star Wars  fiction have not changed much since Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012. First, you must be an author with an actual track record in the publishing business  and  a literary agent. If you have written a legitimately published novel ( not  a self-published effort or “fan-fic”) in the sci-fi or fantasy genre or have worked in the comic book business, Lucasfilm will invite you for an interview and listen to a story pitch. Second, you have to sign all kinds of non-disclosure agreements and play by Lucasfilm’s rules. You also need to abide with the established canon, be able to get stuff done on deadlines, and not try to reinvent the wheel. Furthermore, you will work with editors at Random House  and  have to be aware what other writers are working on so you don’t contradict  their  stories. What you can’t do is write a fan-fic novel or shor

Hi, there, Dear Reader! Well, last time we talked, I told you what my plans were for this week regarding "A Certain Point of View." They were, you'll recall, modest in scope; I'm not working on any big literally projects at the moment, so I've pretty much decided to focus on the blog until I can get my shit together as a writer and crank out a story I can be proud of no matter what the format is; ideally I'd like to do a novel, but every time I've started working on one, I either listen to bad advice from well-meaning people or I become intimidated by the prospect. And, yes, I know; novels, short stories, and screenplays don't write themselves. Either I write one, or I should stop calling myself a writer and give up. I'd rather write one - even if it's bad - than admit defeat. But until I can figure out what story I want to tell, I'll stick to the blog and see if I can get it to the 1000-posts mark. Anyway, about those plans I announc

(C) 2010 Simon & Schuster  Long, long ago, at an early age so far back in my timeline that I can’t exactly remember, I decided that I would become a writer someday. Sure, like most boys in my peer group, I had dreams of pursuing other, more traditionally “manly” careers. At various times in my childhood I dreamed of becoming an astronaut, a pilot, a soldier, a Marine, and – at one point – even President of the United States. But reality – in the shape of a physical disability – flattened most of those naively unrealistic career dreams as surely as an African elephant will squash a ripe tomato. Luckily, I fell in love with the written word early in life; family lore has it that my maternal grandmother Ines taught me how to read – using ABC blocks – before I was two years old. (Mom used to tell a story – perhaps apocryphal – about how she and my father returned to Miami after their last trip to Paris and my grandmother proudly showed them the unlikely spectacle of a to

(C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and CreateSpace (an Amazon company) It is February 1998. 33-year-old Jim Garraty is a respected history professor and bestselling author who lives in New York City. Popular with both students and readers, Jim seems to have it all. Fame, a nice apartment in Manhattan, and a reputation as one of the best World War II historians in the U.S. But when he gets a cryptic email from his best friend from high school, Jim is forced to relive his past - and a trip to his home town of Miami reopens old wounds he thought had healed long ago. Q.: How - or why - did you choose your characters' names? Did you go through a phone book and choose names at random or did you name Jim, Marty, and Mark after people you know? A.: Jim Garraty - or as Stephen King would put it, my I-guy - was, in every iteration of the story (from a CRW-2001 assignment to finished product), Jim Garraty. I'm not sure why I chose James/Jim/Jimmy as his first name; I just knew that