11 May 2018

I'm sitting in Starbucks, as I am wont to do a couple times a week, and I'm supposed to be hunting for typos in a book published nearly 20 years ago.

I'm like two pages in, and all I want is to be able to re-write the whole thing.

The temptation is serious...the original manuscript was started when I was not quite 15 years old, revamped prior to publication when I was 39, and it suffers from seriously awful editing.

There's a boring story behind that, but suffice to say I did not have the same editor then that I have now. I'm not with the same publishing house, either. That's a whole story by itself. Not an interesting one, either, but the short line version: I got hosed and mislead but I got my rights back and went with someone else after a few years.

Now, my current editor has read this book and the ones that follow, and she has not mocked it (at least not to my face...) She thinks that it's time to do a digital omnibus, all 5 novels in one edition, but she didn't mention rewriting the first two, which I know realllllllly need it. The last 3 only need some line cleanup, a stray typo here and there.

If you compare the first book to the fifth, you'll wonder if they were written by the same person. I like the story, I love the characters, and I get why it caught on with the readers who tend to buy in that genre, but man...even I admit the first book is not well written but you have to get through it to get to the better ones, and the fifth is the best of the bunch.

I also admit I am hypercritical of my past work. So there's that.

The only thing really keeping me from doing a total rewrite is the several thousand people who bought the original. Well, that and I'm well into book two in the Return to the Wick Chronicles Series, and should probably finish it and the proposed Max Interviews Buddah book.

I'd also retitle the first book, because that title--one picked when I was 14--is working against the entire series.

Now, I also know the Grand answer is to ask my editor what to do, but the truth is that I'm sitting here in Starbucks kinda not feeling like I want to work, so I blogged instead. But yeah...the typo-hunt is turning into a Rewrite Want.