Writing – calobannon.com

4/12/26

This blog is long overdue for a post, and seeing I don’t have any news regarding my own writing at the moment, I thought I would talk a bit about the formatting process. You might think formatting a piece of writing is something to be done after the fact, after drafting and revising and nitpicking and revising and nitpicking some more. I used to think this too.

I can only speak for myself here, but I have found that beginning a work with the end product in mind—or how you would prefer it to look in book form, in other words—can be beneficial. There are detailed tutorials freely available about how to format a book using Word and similar programs, so I am not going dig too deep into the how of the process here. Rather, I am going to list a few steps that may save you some time in the long run, not to mention the stress and tedium that comes with reformatting hundreds of pages of prose.

Look over your bookshelf and decide what size of paperback would best suit your work, then set the margins of your document to match that size (I tend to prefer the 5.25 x 8 inch format). When you set up your document in such a fashion, you will essentially be typing your paragraphs out the way they will appear in print. If you plan to submit your manuscript to agents or publishers, it is easy enough to save a new copy and clear the formatting and select-all and double-space and so on. Trust me when I say this: it is far easier to de-format a piece than it is to format it.

Set up all of your formatting and preferences before you start writing, or, if that ship has already sailed, take the time to iron this stuff out before your first (or next) round of revisions. What I’m talking about here are things like chapter and section titles, page breaks and spacing and hyphenation settings and the like. If you get this stuff right from the get-go, you can plug your manuscript into any E-Book generation program with minimal fuss (for paperbacks, all you really need is a properly formatted PDF). You can find guides for all of the above online, and, if you are using Word, take a few minutes to read up on the Styles feature. It will fast become your friend.

Don’t worry about adding a table of contents until you have completed multiple revisions and are reasonably sure all of your chapter and section titles are set. Or, better yet, make this step the very last item on your checklist. If you alter the contents of your book after setting this section up, you will need to update the table accordingly, so you might as well wait until everything else is in place. The automated tables in Word can be finicky (particularly if you manually reformat the styles, spacing, et cetera), and you will be glad you only had to format it once.

This one is another post-writing note: When you have reached the end stage of your project, go back to your shelf and pull out five-or-six titles that are similar to your book. Between these five-or-six titles, you should have all the front-and-back matter references you’ll need to create your own pages (copyright, dedication, epigraph, author’s note, and so on). They may look a bit different in places, but they will all (for the most part) be organized in the same fashion. Even if you’ve unearthed a reliable template on the web, this exercise can be useful for sorting out exactly what information you want and/or need to include.

Some of the above largely applies to self-publishing and may-or-may-not be relevant to your endgame, but understanding how a book is going to look in print can (and in my case, does) inform choices you make while writing. It can also save you time, which is no small thing for your average writer. Time is money and money is time, right? Yeah.

Until next time,

Cal

Hawks Pass, The Bad Things, Writing

2/21/26

I am happy to say that The Bad Things is now out and available for purchase (Kindle edition on Amazon and paperbacks via Amazon or IngramSpark and affiliates). It took a bit longer to get over the line than I was anticipating, but alas, sometimes that’s just how it goes. In light of the new release, I figured I would write a bit about the book, the series it will ultimately belong to and why I opted to publish it a few short months after releasing Hawks Pass.

Let’s start with a bit of background. I completed the rough cuts of both Hawks Pass and The Bad Things some time ago. I wrote the first draft of Hawks Pass from 2021-2022 and shelved it, and over the ensuing years I dusted it off, revised it and reshelved it multiple times. The same was true of The Bad Things to a lesser degree (2023-2024), though the tale of how this story came about is a bit more interesting.

I had been trying to write a story involving the types of antagonists in The Bad Things for years, and each of those attempts keeled over and died somewhere along the way. I kept at it, reworking the settings and characters and exposition and so on, and eventually I landed on an idea I liked. I hit a roadblock there, so I started writing something else, and about 40,000 words into that something else, I realized it was an extension of what I had already been trying to write.

But that extension did not evolve into The Bad Things. I hit another roadblock with that one and began working on a different project, and—once again—after writing a good chunk of the story, I realized that effort could be tied to the two others I’d set aside. With that understanding in mind, I was able to plow straight through to the end of the first draft without hitting the same miserable obstacles, and that story—the 3^rd attempt, if you want—ultimately wound up as the first installment in the series. The final revisions that took me so damned long to complete were to ensure The Bad Things could function as book one of a trilogy, that I was properly securing any loose knots, that I was not giving too much away, et cetera.

As for the two stories on the shelf, I will be releasing them as the 2^nd and 3^rd installments in the series in due time. I know the 2^nd book will be titled Relics, and, seeing a good chunk of that story has already been set down, I would cautiously estimate it will be completed no later than the end of 2026. As for the third—my first genuine attempt at establishing this world and the one I originally set out to write—there is plenty of work to be done. As the old saying goes, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

I thought it appropriate to write a bit about the process here due to the seedy environment modern-day writers are forced to navigate. One might assume an author releasing two books within a few months of each other is using AI in some capacity, and I want state firmly and for the record: NO, I do not use AI in my work in any form, not for ideas or drafting, not for editing or revisions, not for artwork, nothing, not a stitch. I could dedicate post upon post to the sordid nature of generative AI and its masters, but for now, I will limit it to a few parting thoughts:

If you fed an idea into a construct and it spat out a narrative, not only did you not write it, but it is no longer your idea. If you used a chatbot or similar program to rework problematic prose, those fixes are not your revisions. If you are generating and uploading AI slop to platforms for any purpose at all, for the love of God or whatever you might hold dear, knock it off.

Perhaps if Congress passed a law where profits generated by materials created or improved by AI went straight to the manufacturers of the program, creators would stop polluting the waters.

Just something to think about.

Until next time,

Cal