Editing to Craft a Spell

And: What's Next for A Gritty Little Tourist Town

When I was ten years old, I climbed up to the Devil’s Backbone, a ridge that ran north/south near our farm. There was an opening in the base called the Keyhole. The story was that an Indian princess had rested there with her baby while fleeing from the army. Who knows?

Yeah, I know. There’s some fetish-izing in that story. It’s gotta be a princess, beaded leather dress with fringe at the bottom, I’m sure. We didn’t know better. Now we can do better.

Anyway, it was a mystical place, the ancient rock, the brilliant blue sky, the Rockies in the near distance, the sound of the wind blowing through the keyhole. I rested there myself after that hot dry hike, and felt the mystical forces of the place.

It didn’t occur to this young Catholic girl that I was experiencing the early twinges of a call to the priesthood. No, I decided that I must have been a witch in an earlier age.

Years later I sat in the chapel at Yale Divinity School, having become an Episcopalian and finally found my call to be a priest. Fred Craddock, a Methodist minister and preacher of renown, was telling a story. I won’t try to repeat it. But it was about a boy, his grandmother, and falling stars.

The gathered congregation sat rapt as he told his tale. When he got to the last line and stopped, there was silence. We held our collective breath. It took a long minute before we came to and, as one, began to applaud.

And in that silence, it came to me—I want to do that!

I have always connected those two, the witch from another age and the preacher.

I cast spells.

I move words around on the page. I listen to their sounds. Do I need a word with a sibilant or hard consonant? Should the last word have one or two syllables? If two, on which one should the accent fall? Which will help the hearer fall under the spell?

Yesterday I submitted to my publisher the final of A Gritty Little Tourist Town. Now it goes to the proofreader. In my last pass through the 190 pages, looking for any edits that hadn’t been cleared, one sentence at the end of one story, near the end, caught my eye.

The tide comes in, the tide goes out, the beach is never the same.
When the tough old birds go out, who will remember their tales?

No. That just wasn’t right.

Here is the very last edit I made before I attached the file to an email addressed to my project manager and hit “send”:

The tide comes in, the tide goes out, the beach is never the same.
When the tough old birds go out, who will tell their tales?

Yes, I am that kind of writer.

Drives my wife nuts. You may not even have noticed what I did there.

But it matters. When casting a spell, every syllable matters. A long vowel or a short vowel? One syllable or three? Alliteration or not?

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So, that’s my big news. A Gritty Little Tourist Town: Bar Tales from Costa Rica is on its way.

Next steps: proofreading, approving a cover, gathering those blurbs, interior design, back cover design, advanced reading copies, and finally, signing off for the printer.

That’s a lot. But yesterday was the biggest—tell my “book widow” wife (and my project manager) that I would make no more changes.

I previously announced a launch date of June 7, 2026. The earth shifted under my publisher—which was a good thing. She Writes Press is now distributed by Simon&Schuster. With that change there was some shuffling. New pub date:

April 7, 2026

You will hear more about this, and get a sneak preview of the cover, in the coming months.

That’s Mary, star of the book, the Voodoo Princess herself.

Pura vida!