I just finished re-editing my book Invasive Species. The new
version will soon appear on Amazon. Now, yes, the book has already been
published and people have already bought it, and so the book has been committed
to the public consciousness. But, damn it, more than a few errors had somehow
crept into the “final” text, and I felt they needed to be stamped out.
The idea was to only fix the shaky grammar, but to otherwise
NOT change the text. I swore to be ultra-conservative about this. After all, everyone
knows what happens when you try to change a “final” work of art (or piece of
entertainment, as the case may be). It never goes well. Never! It’s like a law
of the universe. If your first effort was good enough to “be” something, then,
by law of averages, if you try to change it, the changes will most likely make
worse. Once a work of art is out there, it becomes a part of the fabric of the
universe, and so (hyperbole alert) to revise a “final” work of art is to, in
effect, change history itself! And if history can be changed so easily, what
will become of our future? Remember -- Han Shot First! Or did he? No, not any
longer! Memories have been tampered with, and childhoods have been destroyed.
Yeah, but what if changing something truly does make it
better.
That’s what I asked myself halfway through my revisions. Now
I think at least 90% of the book suits me fine and should be set in stone. But
due to a fiasco I had with a freelance editor, and my self-imposed publishing
timeline, I think, in hindsight, that I rushed the publishing of Invasive
Species. I think it needed one more read through. There were some unnecessarily
wordy sections, several odd grammar choices, and some confusing text that should
have been smoothed out.
So, I rewrote those parts.
Now I didn’t make extensive revisions. Plots were not
changed. Characters were not rewritten. But whole sentences have been deleted,
rearranged, and replaced to make for smooth “better” reading. Unneeded words
have been cast aside, and other words were added. There’s something about
looking at a text after letting it sit for many months, after you’ve let it “cool
off,” that makes you aware of the weirdness and mistakes you should have
corrected the first time through, things seem so obvious now but at the time
had seemed perfectly fine.
Objectivity, I guess is the keyword, and sometimes you only
get that with the passage of time.
So the book is better now. It’s not exactly the same book,
but in this age of digital novels, I’m starting to think that revising should
be seen as a feature and not a bug.
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