Jack of Harts

I’ve learned a lot about writing in the last few years. The first thing I thought I knew after decades of writing stories is that I was at the top of my game and ready for the big leagues. I was sorta right. I was at the top of my game. And the big leagues of being an actual published author are rather nebulous when you think about it. On the plus side, I did pass that test of actually publishing and selling a book. On the minus side, I had a lot to learn about writing. The learning wasn’t always easy, and it led me to do a full rewrite on Forge of War because it just didn’t live up to what I wanted it to be. That rewrite took almost as long as it took to write the book in the first place, but it is what I want it to be now. And I’ve published it in dead tree format as well, and of that I’m doubly proud.

The trick is though, that in the rewriting, I broke some of the continuity of the stories I wrote later. So I’ve been doing some minor revisions in them as well. The most radical is the separation of Dawn into two characters for the Wolfenheim series. I was not fully happy with how I’d handled that originally, even as I was writing it, but I couldn’t say why. And it worked. But the more time I’ve learned about writing, and the more time I’ve spent writing, I started to understand what my subconscious had been telling me at the time. I was being lazy. In a story that felt like it had too many characters, I was trying to lower the number of characters by combining two that shouldn’t have been combined. So, the revised version of Wolfhenheim Rising I’m working on now is fixing that. It’s a very easy switch in most cases, though I did have to cut a few lines of dialog that I particularly liked. I plan on recycling them for later.

The point is, that I’ve reread and sometimes revised every line of every story I’ve published in the last few years to match the rewrite of Forge of Wars. Call it the decision of the author. Has it helped my sales? No. New books drive sales. But my hope is that having a better set of stories will help my sales better in the future. And whether that hope works or not, I can say this. I am more proud of what I’ve published now than I was in the past. So in that alone it was worth it.

If you want to see what I’ve done with the stories, contact me. I can arrange for you to get a look at it. And if you want to see what I write next when I continue Wolfenheim, I can arrange that too. I’m very close to jumping back into that unexplored territory that will…shall we say…have a profound impact on the universe of Jack of Harts. 🙂