As you’ll know, if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been reformatting Kissed by a Rose over the last week or so to get it ready to re-issue after Phaze fell by the wayside. The copy of the e-pub that I have is in a terrible state, with hard HTML paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences, never mind in the middle of paragraphs.
In all honesty, I can’t remember if the copy I have is direct from Phaze or if it’s a conversion of the PDF I got from Phaze—I think it’s the latter, it certainly feels like a PDF conversion—but where-ever I got it from, it needs a lot of work before it can go to KDP for publication.
Why am I editing the e-pub instead of my original Word copy? Because I’d only have to convert it into an e-pub after I’d finished and then go through and tidy up the conversion so what’s the damn point?
Anyway, the point of this rambling introduction is that as you may or may not know (depending on how many of my books you’ve read and how observant you are of them) there is a secondary character from Kissed that becomes a major character in a later book of mine (two later books actually, but I’m still writing one of them) and it’s fascinating to me to see her in Kissed—it almost feels like the first time, it’s been so long since I last revisited this book—and to think about how she is in that later book and in the book I’m writing, where she’s a much more rounded and interesting character.
Now, I suppose there could be a couple of reasons for this. First, and most obviously, she’s a secondary character in Kissed. While not exactly an antagonist, she is very much the sceptical counter-point to Chloe, the heroine. So, naturally, when she finally steps centre-stage, she’ll receive much more in the way of character development.
But it could also be that by the time I wrote the second book, I’d just become a much better writer. Okay, maybe not much better, but better.
In all honesty, it’s probably a combination of the two.
But it’s the second possible reason here that leaves me with a dilemma. I’ve already stated that my intention after performing the e-book clean-up is to give the book a fresh edit to pick up any error that may have slipped through the net the first time around.
But it’s going to be really hard to resist the temptation to not just do some light-touch editing, but to heavily re-write the book in a style more akin to how I write now. But I’m going to have too—making major changes to a book that was first released ten years ago is just wrong.
Isn’t it?
