Patience is a Virtue

Well my day job puked all over my free time the past few weeks, and for the first time in a long time, I’ve gone more than a day at time without working on writing related tasks. This is, in part, due to the fact that I am now cycling back to edit The Solid-State-Shuffle, book 1 in the Sunken City Capers series. This both an awesome and terrifying task.

I finished The Solid-State Shuffle almost nine months ago now, and have written two more complete novels in that series since then. As the series evolved so too did the characters, the world, and the tech. I pants this series, which means I make it up as I go along and trust myself and my process that’ll it all come together in the end (which it does, but usually unexpectedly so). The problem became that as I made stuff up for books 2 and 3, that book 1 needed to be changed to accommodate those narrative decisions.

This is why patience is a virtue. I get to make to those changes. And that is both awesome and terrifying.

Initially, as I went back to edit chapter 1 in The Solid-State Shuffle, I was a little stressed out and despondent. I hadn’t looked at book 1 in nine months and chapter 1 needed a fair amount of reworking. Most writers hate to go back and read their “earlier” work because we feel we’ve gotten better with practice (and usually so). I was no different here. I was both terrified of screwing it up, making book 1 inconsistent, as well as reading it again for the first time in a while and hating it, killing enthusiasm for the series.

Well, chapter 1 did need a little more love than the other chapters, but once I was through that, it went easy. Like “damn this fun” easy. And book 1 is about ten times stronger than it was before the edits. I finally found what book 1 had been missing and it makes it all the more awesomer. It just took me to book 3 to figure it out, and then it was like a flash of lightening and I started cackling in delight.

Had I rushed publishing to “get something out there,” I wouldn’t have been able to make those edits and make book 1 the strongest book I could. Patience is a virtue, and I consider myself fortunate and lucky to have been patient at least once in my life.

 

The eARC for The Solid-State Shuffle (the book that is now ten times more awesome and set to be published October 2016) is scheduled to go out July 1 to a select group of advance readers. You can still sign up here if you’re interested.

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