Editor’s Note to Return to the Hollow Earth

[This is my note to my Mason Reynolds novel, Return to the Hollow Earth. I’ve illustrated the post with some photos taken during a visit with our daughter Georgia and her husband Courtney in Madison, Wisconsin, and then a train trip from Chicago to Denver and onward to Oakland, California.]

In 1990, I edited Mason Reynolds’s 1850 manuscript, The Hollow Earth, and I saw it into publication. The Hollow Earth ends with Mason and his wife Seela setting off for California aboard a clipper ship, the Purple Whale. Newspaper records of the time report that the Purple Whale sank off Cape Horn with no survivors.

For years I’ve wondered if Mason and Seela might somehow have made their way to California anyway—and whether they ever revisited the Hollow Earth.

In 2006, one of my woman readers emailed me that, while on a dive trip to Fiji, she’d spent a passionate night with a man named Alan Poague, who showed her an unfinished manuscript attributed to Mason Reynolds and entitled Return to the Hollow Earth.

By way of researching this, my wife and I took a cruise on a liveaboard dive boat in Fiji—great fun. In a village on one of the smaller islands, I met this Alan Poague, a Californian who’d gone native in the islands. A raffish and engaging man, he played a steel guitar in the lounge of an inn that catered to divers and surfers. I told him my story, and he readily showed me the manuscript pages that he’d shown the woman diver who’d emailed me.

Poague said he was familiar with my edition of The Hollow Earth, and that his manuscript was by Mason Reynolds as well. How so? Supposedly the words had come to Poague in a kava trance, that is, in a waking dream brought on by an intoxicating local plant. He’d typed the text without really having to think about it. He’d produced eleven pages this way, and then the flow had stopped, or he’d gotten distracted—and he’d moved onto other projects. He was now assembling a diving guidebook for the Great Astrolabe Reef. And he dreamed of writing a New Age work based on his notions of the thought-processes of the woomo. I made a copy of Poague’s eleven pages and we returned home.

Ten years later, in April, 2017. I began having lucid dreams involving the Hollow Earth—in particular I was sensing the mind of the giant woomo whom Mason called Uxa. Uxa was extending her tendrils from the core, worming them through volcanic vents and ocean-floor holes. Upon reaching me, Uxa’s fronds wrapped my body in a net of pale gold. Using this connection, the Great Old One was speaking to me—not in words nor in images, but via certain physical sensations. She was making my fingers twitch.

I had no writing project that April. Sitting at my computer keyboard one morning, I turned my thoughts to my dreams of Uxa. As I thought of her, my fingers began to move. Suddenly I realized that Uxa wanted me to type the second narrative of Mason Reynolds.

I knew this in the same non-verbal way that I might know the workings of a mathematical proof. Mason had written Return to the Hollow Earth in his head, Uxa had read his mind, and now she was using me to put Mason’s words to paper. She’d tried earlier to use Alan Poague of Fiji for her scribe, but he hadn’t had the patience. But now, with me already having edited The Hollow Earth, Uxa had found someone who would see the project through.

Smiling to myself, I unleashed my fingers and let the story flow. As my tekelili connection to Uxa sharpened, I began mentally hearing the words I wrote, and inwardly seeing the scenes I described.

The strange, intense transmission lasted several hours, and when I was done, I’d typed the first six pages of Return to the Hollow Earth. The next day I typed five more. I compared what I had to my copy of the Alan Poague manuscript. The two texts were word for word the same.

For a week nothing more came. I lost hope. Perhaps I’d unwittingly memorized Poague’s manuscript and had merely retyped it. Perhaps there was no Uxa. Perhaps I was a doddering, self-deluded, borderline-senile old man. A writer at the end of his rope.

But then, bam, Uxa linked into me for three days in a row—and I was well into the second chapter. My joy mounted, and in the coming months my confidence steadily grow. I didn’t like telling my wife or my friends exactly what I was up to. I just said I was working on a sequel to The Hollow Earth, and that I had no outline at all, and that I was depending entirely on the muse. My scribing continued, off and on, for nearly a year. Nobody paid me much mind. Writing is what I do.

On March 24, 2018, things got stranger. According to what I was transcribing in the pages of Return to the Hollow Earth, Mason had arrived that day in Big Sur! No longer was he a fictional or a historical figure. He was here and now, just down the coast from my Los Gatos home. A day later, I found myself typing that Mason and his family had moved in with four undocumented Latinos in the Beach Flats neighborhood of Santa Cruz. Should I go and meet him? I didn’t quite dare.

How had Mason jumped so far forward in time? I had only to study the pages I’d written. Mason had spent over a hundred and sixty seven years stranded with the woomo Uxa in the slow time zone at the Hollow Earth’s core. Evidently it was near the end of that stay when Uxa began using her tekelili to send out Mason’s narrative for transcription. First she’d tried it with Alan Poague, and then she’d turned to me. And then Mason had escaped the slow time zone and he’d ridden to Big Sur in a live flying saucer made of two veem. And, now, even with Mason so far away from the Earth’s core, Uxa was still picking up his mental narrative—and transmitting the updates to me.

On March 28, 2018, I found myself writing that Mason had sold an article to a Santa Cruz newspaper called Good Times, and that his article was appearing that day. I’d been leery of seeking him out, but this pushed me over the edge. I got in my car and drove to the Good Times editorial office in Santa Cruz, and asked where I could find Mason Reynolds. A young woman told me to check the crumbling old Evergreen Cemetery.

I hurried there—and I found Mason, along with his wife Seela, their baby Brumble, Mason’s new friends Maya and Rafaelo, plus an inquisitive policeman, and none other than the recently resurrected Edgar Allan Poe, accompanied by his wife Ina. I felt like I was going crazy.

But yet, everything remained, in some ways, ordinary. Mason already knew that I’d edited and published his manuscript of The Hollow Earth, and he was interested in discussing this. He and his friends were on the point of being in trouble with the police, and I was able to talk our way past the problem.

And—Edgar Allan Poe? Was I really meeting Poe? It certainly seemed so, not that he was in good shape, having spent well over a century buried in a bronze casket, and then having immediately gotten drunk. But you know all this if you’ve read Return to the Hollow Earth. Mason describes these scenes better than I. He’s a born writer, a natural.

Having grown used to the fluent, assured tone of Mason’s two narratives, I was startled to see how young he was in person. Eighteen years old, or not quite that. He was dark-skinned from the woomo light, with the features of a slender, white, Southern boy, and with, of course, something of a Virginia accent. He was very articulate, and with a rich vocabulary. His speech had a leisurely pace that matched his origin in slower times. His eyes were quick, animated, and perhaps a bit haunted.

Seela was dark brown, with thin lips and a delicate nose, resembling the Melanesian women of Fiji. She was beautiful and lively, with a sharp tongue. Clearly she loved Mason and Brumble. The moment of her parting with them was very painful, and their reunion a joy.

Mason and Seela didn’t like our present day world, and Mason himself was a bit let down that he hadn’t traveled onward through that dubious tunnel in space with Eddie Poe. I was glad to give Mason and Seela some money—although he thinks it should have been more. I hope I did well in suggesting they move to Pohnpei. And I’m glad to have inherited their dog. Arf is good company, with deep wisdom in his eyes.

In my excitement, I didn’t think to take any photos of Mason, nor of the epic scenes at Big Sur. But Arf is here in the flesh. As I like to tell people, “If you don’t believe the Hollow Earth is real, come visit me and you can see the dog!”

As I write this, he’s lying in a patch of sun, thumping his tail against the floor. Good dog. Arf is my proof that the Earth is hollow.

I’m no longer getting any tekelili updates from Uxa. Perhaps, from the woomo point of view, my mission is done—not that I’m certain what was the purpose of my mission. Perhaps Mason’s two narratives are meant to prepare our society for an eventual merger with the civilizations of the Hollow Earth? The woomo take a long view.

I don’t have any contact information for Mason, but I do have Rafaelo’s email address. A couple of months ago I mailed a paper printout of my draft of Return to the Hollow Earth to Mason in care of General Delivery at Pohnpei. Rafaelo emailed me Mason’s response, and this comprises the brief closing section of the book’s final chapter. I’ve heard nothing more since then.

Judging from Mason’s ending to the book, I think he’s angry about his book being published with so little fanfare—and that he blames me. And never mind that I spent a year writing his book for him, and gave him ten thousand dollars! A slicker promoter might have found a way to package Mason’s adventures into a best-seller. A wiser editor might not insist—in the face of universal derision—that Mason’s two books are literally true.

The public is wary of nuts—and this category unfairly includes believers in the doctrine of the Hollow Earth. But Mason and I are right. As he puts it—to hell with them all. What matters is that we’ve managed to publish the truth, and nobody stopped us.

As a final point, note that definitive proofs of the Hollow Earth doctrine are in the offing. Eventually the passageways at the poles will reopen. As the Antarctic ice melts, the cap across the South Hole will crumble. And, as ice vanishes from the Arctic and the speed of the polar jet stream increases, the pre-1850 North Hole maelstrom will reemerge.

And then Mason Reynolds will be granted his just place in the Pantheon of great explorers!

Get the books today!

Yee-haw! The flying saucers are excited!

“The Red Saucer “oil on canvas, Sept, 2018, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Just finished this painting this week, it took about four sessions—when you use oil instead of acrylic paint, you have to go a little slower, giving the coats some time to dry. I take a deep, atavistic, satisfaction in painting flying saucers. No real reason. It’s like Wassily Kandinsky with his squiggles , or Larry Poons with his dots, or Jean Miro with his hairy ovals.

I laid on a about seven layers of paint for that red saucer’s rim, giving him a Kustom Kolor hot rod sheen. And that orb…is it a sun or a planet? The saucers are interested in it. Maybe it’s their home.

But, wait, what I want to tell you what these wise, living saucers are excited about !

My new novel, Return to the Hollow Earth, which inevitably has a few living saucers among its pullulating and thoroughly fabuloso cast of characters. Visit the book page to see extensive details and buy links. Or just go get the Kindle book on Amazon right now!

I’m still chuckling to myself about some of the bits I put into the new novel. That Eddie Poe!

Writing Return to the Hollow Earth , running a Kickstarter to fund it, and publishing it along with a new edition of my older The Hollow Earth —it’s been quite a push.

I feel like I’m emerging from that tunnel in Fellini’s movie 8½.

And arriving in 2018 San Francisco/Santa Cruz/Los Gatos, greatly changed.

I’ve been decompressing by wading up a long , isolated creek near our house. I walk in the water, on smooth stones, wearing sandals. I never see anyone else, but there are some graffiti. This pompadoured surfer dude is called Naeve. A naive knave? I like that he only has one eye, and that he always looks the same.

Signs of a skattered human tribe, kind of a post-WWIII vibe.

The scraps of nature are like signs from the majestic woomo sea cucumbers of the Hollow Earth.

There’s this one fallen tree I like a lot. Kind of magical, the light there. I painted it, and spent quite a long time on the painting.

“Up the Creek,” acrylic on canvas, August, 2018, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

My old artist friend Barry Feldman had recently remarked to me that I should paint what he considers to be “real” pictures, that is, landscapes with no fantastic critters. I was annoyed by this, but I was in fact goaded into doing a pure landscape. And I’m forever intrigued and challenged by the shapes of running water.

Despite Barry’s injunction, there is a slight possibility that the pair of rocks near the base of the log are in fact a stone UFO. You never know.

Before I relapsed back into my full-on saucer-paintings mode, I did another somewhat realistic painting of the creek. I combined some images I’d seen.

The creek is, in a way, so abstract looking. Like this bi-color zone photo here.

And I saw this one-clawed crawfish kind of threatening me, or waving to me. He reminded me of my old friend Greg Gibson. “Hi Greg,” I said.

“Standing in the Stream,” acrylic on canvas, August, 2018, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

So I put those two together, starting out with swirls that were meant to represent the flows of the water, and the ripples on top.

In the Kingdom of Puf and Naeve.

Not that I’m high on pot. High on sensations and ideas. I recently read this book by Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What It Seems. He has a crazy rap about quantized space and time. And I’m looking forward to reading his new pop-sci book, The Order of Time. By the way, here’s a short semi-techincal article of his free online, “Space and time in Loop Quantum Gravity.”

So what does he say about time? Well, the world is made of chunks of space, each with some associated “volume” but you can’t subdivide them. They’re connected via links that represent their shared surface areas. And time is links between events. But the links aren’t sharp…the image I came away with is that my memories of my past are a fairly accurate approximation of what physical time is like. If two events remind me of each other, they have a “temporal” link.

There’s no master time, no overall flow. Just this heap of events…or perceptions…or thoughts…or sensations. And the way we associatively piece together our hoards is pretty much what real time is like. We create time and it creates us…if that means anything. Scraps of imagery in the fog. Greg and the crawfish. With Robert Plant’s “Stairway to Heaven” solo playing. High on life, man!

The stone splash of my glance, the minnow darts of my impressions.

Those primeval playmates space and time.

Go get yourself some of that Hollow Earth, baby!

As I’ve been mentioning, I spent the last two months doing final revisions for my two novels Return to the Hollow Earth (written 2017-2018, to appear from my Transreal Books in August or September, 2018) and Million Mile Road Trip (written 2015-2016, to appear from Night Shade Books, May 2019). Like ordering a dessert, and getting two. Fun, interesting, but now I’m worn out. Made (literally) about three thousand changes, large and small. By now I’m in a drifty, twinkling sci-fi fog, with my brain falling out.

In the 50s and 60s, there was a notion that science fiction was a subliterature on the same low level as porn. Paul Di Filippo dug up this old photo to instantiate this notion. When I tweeted it, one of my followers commented to a friend, “That’s him in the doorway,” meaning me. I kind of liked that. Almost like being beatnik.

What with all the revising, I haven’t gotten around to blog posts, other than a recent one about how to make an ebook. So today, as I sometimes do, I’ll just be putting up some things from my bulging photo stash—even when I’m writing, I keep taking pictures.

Did I ever post this photo of the Big Wheel race on Potrero Hill on Easter? Such a jolly event, and somehow nobody seemed to be getting injured. Adults (mostly) riding random scavenged kids’ tricycles, Big Wheels, or office chairs.

Here’s my Notes for Return to the Hollow Earth manuscript from when I was nearly done revising the novel and (for that matter) the notes. Plus a corner of my home made Keith-Haring-style UFO painting, “I Once Was Blind, But Now I See.” I don’t understand why nobody has bought this painting…for sale for a (relative) pittance on my fab Paintings Page. And that’s my nice Panama hat that I got about a year ago. They tend not to last more than one or two years…either getting lost or getting a cracked hole. Really the subject of this photo is shades of beige and yellow…and the use of the triangle.

My writer friends Paul Di Filippo and Richard Kadrey delight in posting altered covers of old pulp paperbacks, somehow transmogrified into fantasy, science-fiction or horror titles. [See photo of me in the doorway at the start of this post.] This cover is the actual 1953 Ace Double edition of William Burroughs’s first novel, Junkie, which he published under the nom de plume Willy Lee. My book dealer pal Greg Gibson gave me the book years and years ago. I knew of this book from the earliest days, and it’s existence inclined me to send my 1979 novel White Light to Ace Books, as did Ian Watson’s “Miracle Visitors.” Like, “Those Ace guys are cool…” Greg was outraged when I actually took my rare Ace Double out of its plastic bag and read it, wanting to soak up the seedy 50s atmosphere. By the way, I feel it cannot be emphasized enough that William Seward Burroughs was fundamentally a science fiction writer, and is the true father of us all. But who is us?

Went for a hike in the Santa Cruz Mountains near the famed Alice’s Restaurant with Sylvia, Rudy Jr., and two of his kids. My granddaughter coiffed me with a Bozo do, kind of nice. Like a Mr. Frostee cone.

Big show by the surrealist Rene Magritte at the SFMOMA in San Francisco. Here’s a painting I’d never seen—I forget the title now, easy to do, as a true surrealist often chooses a title that has nothing whatsoever to do with the image, although, of course, any image and any title do, at the deep waking-dream level, illuminate each other. I’d never thought of candles as being, potentially, flexible snakes. Aha!

Our veteran artist pal Paul Mavrides came to the show with us. “Paul broke a big Magritte painting.”

Synchronicity and randomicity. Both my new books involve one specific 4D construct: which you might call an “unny tunnel,” or “anomaly,” or “wormhole,” or “Einstein-Rosen bridge.” “You know what they are,” insisted the seedy old writer. And synchronisitically I did the photographic equivalent of a “butt dial” on Valencia Street last week, that is, I shot a picture without noticing I did it, and the image has a very nice “lost in the fourth dimension” look to it. A calling card from the Muse: “Crossing a 4D street.”

Here’s a diagram explaining something complicated that happens near the end of Million Mile Road Trip. That square with the tail and the higher-dimensional eyestalk, I call her Yulia, or the flat cow.

Demotic art of the graffitist, seen under a bridge over a woodland creek where I like to hike. I walk in the water on the gravel mostly, wearing Keens sandals. I went here the day after I finished fixing Million Mile Road Trip. Dig the five Us in the Puuuuuf…one U is unseen. Marveling at the woods, and beautiful disorderly order of the clouds and the ripples in the creek and the wind-wobbling leaves, it seems to me that it would be odd and unnecessary to vape to “get higher” Chaos is Enuuuuuf. But whatever works, dude. Far be it from me. Not even. Joie de vivre.

“Woomo Hunters” oil on canvas, May, 2018, 24” x 18”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

While I was working on the ending to Return to the Hollow Earth, I did a painting of five large “woomo” creatures floating over a sea, with two men catching a baby woomo, and slitting it open, with their little boy watching. I don’t think that the hunters are prudent.

I took the composition of the hunters/fishers in the boat from a very famous 1556 drawing by Peter Bruegel. When the drawing was made into an etching, the publisher put the signature “Hieronymous Bosch” on it, just to help the sales. I love the thought of that. Bruegel forging Bosch! Like Jimi Hendrix playing Dylan’s “All Along the Watch Tower.”

That’s enough for today. I’ll post some more later this week, or next week. Here’s a passage from Million Mile Road Trip that I find amusing and heavy. The flat cow (shown above) is talking to my character Villy about the nature of reality as related to the two connected universes in the novel.

The world is made of stoooories,” says the flat cow, getting into a divine wisdom routine. “Not atooooms. Words weave the cosmoooos. A tangle of gossip, archetypes, and jooookes.”

The moos echo in Villy’s head. He’s always imagined his thoughts to be images of the firm external world. But Yulia’s saying it’s the other way around. Villy makes an effort to get to that state of mind. And for a few seconds he’s there. Reality is a sea of sensations, feelings, and tales, intricately linked, with everything alluding to everything else. And the stodgy, solid, kick-a-brick, normative world—that part is the illusion. That part is the dream.

As for the split between ballyworld and mappyworld—there’s really no difference between dreaming the world as a bunch of planets, or dreaming the world as an endless sheet of basins. Either way, it’s the same gnarly thing underneath. Feet on a welcome mat. A tangle of talk. Yeah. Villy feels high as a kite.

Just like the forked birch stick and her shadow, eh?

I just finished doing my final revision of my novel Million Mile Road Trip, which will appear in hardback from Night Shade Books in May, 2019, and in ebook from Transreal Books at the same time. And today I wanted to quickly make an ebook out of it to share with Marc Laidlaw, who’s going to write an intro.

Re. ebooks, it means turning your doc into an EPUB and/or a MOBI file, for use as ebooks. Kindles read MOBI. Browsers and the iBook app and other devices read EPUB. And today I’ll explain a way to get from a a text RTF file to an Amazon ebook using just the free Calibre program.
And, like I”m saying, I tested the method on Million Mile Road Trip today.

[The Night Shade release will have a different cover, very cool, with art by Bill Carman. The art here is by me, and it depicts the novel’s chief villain, an evil extrademensional alien bagpipe who spews “leech saucers” that want parasitize us here on Earth.]

Although I’d like to let you to get your hands on the Million Mile Road Trip book right now,I’m going to hold back on distributing it until after we go to official publication in May, 2019. But here’s a tiny taste that I think is funny.

“The world is made of stoooories,” says the flat cow, getting into a divine wisdom routine. “Not atooooms. Words weave the cosmoooos. A tangle of gossip, archetypes, and jooookes.”

The moos echo in Villy’s head. He’s always imagined his thoughts to be images of the firm external world. But Yulia’s saying it’s the other way around. Villy makes an effort to get to that state of mind. And for a few seconds he’s there. Reality is a sea of sensations, feelings, and tales, intricately linked, with everything alluding to everything else. And the stodgy, solid, kick-a-brick, normative world—that part is the illusion. That part is the dream.
As for the split between ballyworld and mappyworld—there’s really no difference between dreaming the world as a bunch of planets, or dreaming the world as an endless sheet of basins. Either way, it’s the same gnarly thing underneath. Feet on a welcome mat. A tangle of talk. Yeah. Villy feels high as a kite.

Feet on a welcome mat. Yah, mon.

[Sculptures by my friend Vernon Head of Sacramento.]

Okay, back to maximum geekage.

* In converting a document into an ebook, you want to have a decent Table of Contents, which is sometimes a stumbling block. So now I’ll describe a pretty simple method that takes one step in Calibre. Sometimes I use more complicated processes. In fact most of the time, I first bring my document into InDesign and export an EPUB from there. But that’s hard for a beginner. Another more complicated option is to do an intermediate conversion from document to HTML and then convert the HTML into EPUB. When I was starting out with self-pubbing ebooks I used to do that. For some of my earlier thoughts on the process, see my series of posts “How to Make an Ebook.”. These posts are from 2011 and I updated them in 2016. But now I’m giving you a fresh 2018 look.

* I work in Microsoft Word, with DOC files that I can then convert to the agnostic format RTF (rich text format). But you can use another word processor just as well, and save your file as an RTF just the same. In order to get a good table of contents, you have to give all your chapter headings the same style in your DOC. Use the standard Word style name Heading 1. (If you use the more HTML-like style name h1, this method won’t work.) Re. putting the Heading 1 style on each chapter title, you have to be kind of robotic and geeky about this. (a) Search through the book for every chapter title and double check that it has the Heading 1 format. (b) Search through the book for the Style Heading 1, and make sure it’s not on things like blank skipped lines or on random works. If you want subsections in your TOC (not always a good idea) you have to format the subsection titles with standard Word formats like Heading 2, Heading 3 and so on.

*Save the edited DOC for safekeeping. And then save it as an RTF. If the document has a built-in table of contents that you generated with Word or with some ohte wordprocessor, delete that from the RTF. It’ll just put a junky looking TOC (with irrelevant page numbers) into the start of your ebook, also having the TOC puts extra links into the ebook that you don’t really need. Now Open Calibre and do “Add a Book” based in the RTF file. (You can’t add DOC files to Calibre). By the way, note that if you later revise your RTF, you can use the Convert Books dialog to delete the old RTF and add in your new one, without changing all the other settings.

* Set the Metadata fields in Calibre. That is, put in an image for the cover, if you have one, 1200 x 1600 works fine. Also put in your name and the title, and maybe a Copyright line, and a comment on what the book is, like what version.

* Go into the Convert Books dialog in Calibre and set output to EPUB In the Convert Books dialog. If that one works, then you can convert to MOBI later. I’m in the habit of making an EPUB because I can look at it on my Chrome browser using, like the Magic Scroll app. Also if there’s something screwed up about the book I get, I can open up the EPUB in the freeware Sigil program and look at the code inside the EPUB. Also if I want to post my book to KDP to appear on Amazon, I have to send them an EPUB…they don’t want a MOBI that I made.

[My friend Edward Marritz, cinematographer.]

* Before setting the conversion in motion, go to the graphical menu bar on the side of the Covert Books dialog, open the Look and Feel dialog and go to the Layout sheet and put a checkmark by “Remove Spacing between paragraphs” The default paragraph first line indent is set to 1.5 em, which is reasonable. It looks better to have indents than to skip lines.

* Now go to the Convert Books | Table of Contents. My sense is that you will get a good table of contents no matter what settings you have here, as long as you have your chapters all in Heading 1 format. I tend to think you might as well have all the boxes unchecked. If you want, you can put a check mark by “Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents,” but so far as I can tell, it does not in fact matter. My sense is that if Calibre sees an RTF with Heading 1 chapter titles, it assumes that’s what’s supposed to be in the Contents. (Correct me in a comment if you find this is wrong.)

* If you have problems with the contents, try this. Convert again, but this time, go into the Table of Contents dialog, and go way down at the bottom of the dialog, and put a checkmark by “Manually fine-tune the T0C after conversion is completed.” Then do the conversion, and Calibre will open an “Edit the Toc” dialog after building the EPUB. If the autogenerated Toc sucks, click the “Generate Toc from major headings” button in the “Edit the Toc” dialog and probably you’ll get a chance to ask for the Heading 1 style headings, and maybe you’ll get a full book TOC then. Possibly you have some of bogus entries (if you’ve been careless about using the Heading 1 style), or possibly you have some missing entries (if you’ve been to stingy with your Heading 1 style.) You can fix these using the the “Remove this Entry” and/or the “New Entry” buttons.

* Now you’re good. Close the “Edit the Toc” dialog, and click on the “Path: Click to Open” line in the lower right corner of the Caliber screen. This directs you to some obscure directory holding your new-built EPUB with the good Toc. Copy this EPUB file to somewhere where you can find it easily again.

* Test your file in, say, an epub reader app or extension in your browser, or directly in Safari, or in iBooks.

* And test your EPUB with the downloadable Kindle Previewer tool if you like. In the Kindle Previewer, the Toc will not seem to work, but this is misleading. The NCX View over at the right side of the Kindle Previewer menu bar does work . And this means that Amazon will in fact be able to build a working ebook with a proper Toc from your EPUB.

* The Kindle Previewer saves a MOBI version of your EPUB to your disk, you’ll find it in a subdirectory of the directory where your EPUB lives. You can copy this MOBI to your Kindle device to test it some more. The Toc will work on your Kindle. Also you can email this MOBI to your friends who have Kindles. Alternate: you can use Calibre to convert your original RTF to a MOBI as well.

* By the way, what if Kindle Previewer finds errors or warnings in your EPUB? What if Amazon KDP won’t convert it? Open the book in Calibre. Select Edit Book. In that dialog there should be a pane for “Check Book.” Click on “Run Check.” If it finds errors, click, “Try to correct all fixable errors automatically.” If that works, resubmit the EPUB.

* If the automatic error fixing doesn’t work, Calibre allows you to “Edit your Book,” that is, edit the EPUB files, which are basically a bunch of HTML files. This is tricky for a beginner, as these edits may break things, but going back to the “Check Book” can often fix things.

* If you don’t like how your EPUB looks, you can poke around in the Calibre settings, The Convert Books | Look and Feel dialog has a number of panes. And sometimes it makes a nicer output if go to Convert Books | Heuristic Processing and check the box by “Turn On Heuristic Processing.” If you’re unsure about the other checkboxes here, try Googling about them or try looking at the Calibre documentation.

* When you’re done, upload the EPUB to Amazon KDP to publish it on Amazon! Alternately you can upload the MOBI to Amazon, as long as you use the MOBI that was created by the Kindle Previewer. (KDP won’t accept a MOBI made by Calibre.)