I don’t know about you, but I think writing a piece, letting it lie dormant, and then going back with fresh eyes is a great idea. When I first wrote/rewrote/edited/rewrote Sailing Out of Darkness, I listened to a lot of folk who had various things to say about it. Cut this, add that, change the voice, change the language, don’t be real — reality might offend. What I ended up with was fine, but it wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind.
Now, several years later, I’m reworking it. Will I improve it? I haven’t a clue, but I’ll tell you one thing: I’m having fun. And I think the distance has made me more able to hear the voice speaking in my head. The one that others shouted down because I listened more to them than to my instincts.
Won’t it be fun to see if the voice speaks truth and if I’m hearing it without too many filters this time?
Now I’m going to show you Monday morning’s glory as seen from Sea Venture’s deck on the way south from Bahia San Carlos.
Sigh – what a great lifestyle for a writer! I recently went back to the first fiction I published. The publisher was an audio publisher who decided to invest in the equipment and do print as well. He did, about 500 copies, and decided he'd better stick to audio. The book got great reviews and recognition but there were no books to sell. Almost ten years later Lee Emory over at Mountainview decided to take a chance on brinking it back out. I completely rewrote it and was amazed at what I needed to do to it, how much my writing had improved, and I added 30,000 words. What a difference
Terry, I'm glad you're getting a chance to rewrite and a chance to republish. Wonderful.What I'm finding is that as I'm cleaning this up, I'm also putting some material back in that I'd taken out on the advice of someone who may have been right — and then may not have been. I'll let my new readers have a go at the revised work–if they hate it, then I'll know that the voice in my head goofed. If not, then I'll trust myself more the next time.