Morning, Squiders. I hope you all had a lovely long weekend (for American Squiders), or that you at least didn’t get stung by a bee and fall down the stairs like some other people I know.
In slightly related news, how do you tell if you are allergic to bee stings?
Anyway, on to the topic at hand. There seems to be two camps when talking about books you’ve published. One camp says leave ’em alone–they’re out in the world, for better or worse, and you’re likely to just drive yourself crazy fixing things if you don’t just cut yourself off.
The other camp says, if you have access to your books, why not fix them? If there’s something consistently wrong, according to your reviews, and you can easily upload a new version, why wouldn’t you do it?
Personally, I find myself more in the first camp. Perfection is something we all hope for in a book, of course, but it is something that is hard to obtain, and even if you think it’s perfect, there’s no guarantee that anyone else will agree with you. Why drive yourself crazy tweaking this thing or that?
(One exception, I would say, would be nonfiction books. Then I say update, because it’s important to have the best information out there.)
That being said, I’m not against some tweaking, and it can be fun to go back through a book, to remember the writing journey and so forth. And it’s not a bad idea to occasionally read through and remind yourself what the story is about and what you love about it, so you can talk to the book if someone asks you about it.
(And I advocate reading through a book if you’re planning to write a sequel or related story, so you can recapture tone/characterization/etc.)
Last night I started reading through Shards. If you’ve been with me for a while, you were probably around when Shards came out in December of 2013. Shards is kind of off-genre for me, and it’s proven to be the most mixed of my books, in terms of whether people love it or hate it. Part of that, I think, is the book description, which I think may be somewhat misleading.
So, I’m going to rewrite the book description and see what that does. But, to do that, I have to remember what the book is. So, reading.
I’m only a chapter and a half in, thus far. So far, I’m enjoying it, though that is probably to be expected. I have noticed that the writing is not as tight as my more recent stuff, but that is also probably to be expected. One does hope that one gets better over time, after all.
Have you ever revisited a story that’s already been published, Squiders? Are you in the let it free and leave it camp, or the update as necessary camp? Any thoughts on Shards or its book description? It might be handy, if you haven’t read the book, to read the book description and then let me know what kind of story it sounds like so I can tweak appropriately.
