A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Image Credit; Pixabay   The Last Song   By OpenAI in the style of Jennifer Egan, based on my novella, Reunion   Marty leaned against the piano, her fingers tracing the keys. She looked at me with a mix of nostalgia and regret. “Can you believe it?” she said. “This is it. The end of the line.”   I shrugged, trying to act casual. I didn’t want to admit how much it hurt to say goodbye. We had spent three years in this chorus room, singing our hearts out, sharing our dreams and fears. We had become more than friends. We had become a duet.   “Aren’t you going to miss it?” she asked.   “Of course I will,” I said. “But life goes on, right? We have to move forward.”   She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced. She had a wistful look in her eyes, as if she wanted to freeze time and stay here forever.   “I wish we could have sung that song together,” she said.   “Which song?” I asked, playing dumb.   She gave me a playful punch on the arm. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. The one we we

  Earlier today I asked Bing's AI Chatbot to reimagine the plot of my novella Reunion: A Story as a poem in the style of 19th Century writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe. Bing obliged me; this is what it produced:  In June of '83, young Jim Garraty A senior at South Miami High A staff writer for the school paper, he A scholar bound for college nigh But as commencement draws near Jim must deal with unfinished business The girl he loves from afar will disappear And rumor has it she'll be gone for the summer, no less Worse still, Marty doesn't know How deeply Jim's feelings for her are Unless he tells her so But when opportunity arises, Jim hesitates afar Now 15 years later, James Garraty An up-and-coming history professor Respected by his peers and literary But true love eludes him no lesser Reunion is a tale of regret and loss Of friendship and choices made A glimpse into a life that leaves us at a loss And leaves us questioning our own crusade. © 2018, 2023 Alex Diaz-Gr

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

The new cover art for the Kindle edition of my novella. ©2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and KDP.              Reunion v. 1.0 As I mentioned in my most recent blog post, I spent all last weekend and Monday (and up to early Tuesday morning) revising my novella Reunion: A Story.  I wrote the original version sometime in 1998, using much of an old writing exercise from a creative writing course I took back in 1987 as a foundation for the story. For many years, I transferred the Microsoft Word file with the original draft of Reunion from one computer to another but never did anything useful with it. Oh, I showed it to potential girlfriends and other friends who I thought might enjoy it. I even asked one of my business writing clients to print one copy for me; she owned a printing shop, and since I wasn’t asking for a hardcover edition, she gladly granted me that small boon. (I later loaned that copy to a neighbor, but I never got it back.) As the third anniversary of my mother’s death appro

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.

Illustration Credit: Pixabaay Greetings, Constant Reader, and welcome once again to Bloggin' On,  the section of A Certain Point of View that's not devoted exclusively to either reviews or political commentary. It's Saturday morning here in my corner of Florida, and right now it's a nice and cool one at that. The present temperature is 75℉ (24℃) under mostly cloudy skies, although the forecast for the area calls for a high of 85℉ (30℃) and lots of humidity and clouds in the afternoon. Well, I received my Blu-ray of Kenneth Shapiro's 2013 award-winning documentary  Great Voices Sing John Denver on Thursday; of course, I watched it as soon as I retrieved it from our mailbox and was pleased to see that the film includes entire performances by the 15 opera singers who participated in the creation of the eponymous tribute album produced by the late Milton Okun and Elisa Justice. © 2013 Great Voices Film Company and CDK Productions     All in all, I'd h

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

(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

(C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and CreateSpace (an Amazon company) Q.: Now that the story has been on Amazon for 10 days or so and has gotten good reviews - one reader wrote, "I really enjoyed reading this story. The author's descriptive writing brought me back to high school.    Really made me think about the 'what ifs' in life." - what are your plans for Reunion ? Will you expand it into a novel? Will there be a sequel?  A.: Before I decided to go ahead and publish Reunion: A Story "as is," I considered expanding it into a longer book, perhaps a novella at the very least. After all, the story expanded outward from one short scene into a fully-fledged short story once, so why not try expanding it further. There are a lot of references in the backstory - Jim's breakup with his first girlfriend, for instance, or maybe the whole business with Jim asking Marty to sing a duet with him at the (sadly) canceled Spring Concert - that could have been expl