March 2025 – Paul Cervantes

It will be up at Amazon within a couple days. When it’s live I will put a link here.

914 is part of a collection of short stories I had hoped to finish by now. Alas. My new plan is to release each (or small mini-collections) while I continue to work on the collection. This will give me time to revise the stories individually before dealing issues related to the collection.

The collection will be available both in ebook and on paper, the individual stories are electronic exclusively.

A note my workflow evolution. I composed 914 in Apple Notes, as always. But, this time I imported the copy into Pages so I could eventually export it to EPUB. Who knows how long KDP will allow EPUB? No matter, I’m taking advantage for now.

A small lesson learned was that EPUB doesn’t support headers or footers, so no pagination. This makes sense when one considers the resulting copy has to be reflowable.

Pages is not especially intuitive. I can imagine a day when it will be even more like Word. But, it’s manageable and that’s all I ask for today.

I’ve finished Part 1 of 914 and I’m pretty happy with it.

It seems our friends at Amazon’s KDP have given up on their MOBI file in favor of their new creation, KPF. For a writer, KPF is just the latest hurdle on the journey to getting what our work onto the KDP platform, but who am I to complain?

Then I thought of something. I composed 914 in my usual app, Apple Notes. Then, after reading about the demise of MOBI on March 18 I noticed that KDP will grudgingly accept an EPUB file. I recalled Apple’s Pages allowed for export to EPUB so I decided to export to Pages and then to EPUB. Part 1 of 914 is long for a short story (about 6,000 words) but simple in terms of layout. There are no sections or chapter headings and I don’t care much about widows and orphans for something that won’t appear on paper until my entire short story collection is done. So, I dumped the 914 copy into Pages, worked out pagination and a header, and now I’m down to editing. If the resulting file is really cool with the wise algos at KDP then I’m cool, too.

I had some ideas about the cover but I really don’t want to spend too much time on it. 914 is only one of a collection of short stories I decided to publish by itself. Why not? There’s no downside and it seems wise to keep up with how KDP’s machinery works as well as I can. Enter ChatGPT. Chat is all in and came up with two promising ideas in the snap of the finger. After I made a few corrections Chat said:

Great choice! I’ll modify the image to include a classic blue-and-yellow California plate with a slightly obscured number while keeping the overall aesthetic intact. I’ll get that done and share it with you shortly. I’ll start working on the modifications now. Once it’s ready, I’ll share the updated version with you.

And then, nothing. When I reached out this morning to check progress Chat said:

Good morning! I haven’t started editing the image yet, but I’ll get to work on it now. I’ll update you as soon as it’s ready!

At least he’s positive and enthusiastic. Who knew working with AI would feel exactly the same as working with a living, breathing artist?

Paul Cervantes

Month: March 2025

914 part 1 is done!