February 2022 – An Interesting Experience

“Administration is not a creative person’s game” – Unknown

Actually, that was me. I made it up. I’ve run out of excuses for not posting on my website, but I do have a rather valid one: I’ve been writing novels. I think the last time I posted I had just finished “Alex”. I’ve since finished “Cres”. These two novels are about the two characters from the novel “Limits”. “Cres” is currently with my best critic and hopefully I’ll get notes soon. But of course, I don’t want to be idle while I wait, so I started the 5th novel in the series: “Return”.

It’s been well over a year since I finished “Limits”, and when I started writing “Return”, I couldn’t quite remember everything that they had said to each other. For example, did Alex tell Cres the name of his first girlfriend? Did Cres ever tell Alex what happened on Mars or was it just implied? And so, I figured that if I was going to have these two characters back together again, I should remind myself of what happened the last time. I therefore loaded the book “Limits” onto my Kindle, and took a week of evenings and weekends to re-read my own book.

And that’s when this became an interesting experience. Because it was the first time that I read my book as a (facsimile of a) real book, and not in a word processing app on my tablet. And boy, was I shocked. No, the story itself was fine. Even the vast majority of the conversations that Alex and Cres have are fine. But it’s more…how they say it. Even when they’re thinking to themselves, quite a few times, there were issues with the sentence structures. I like to think that the way I write has a certain rhythm to it, a certain cadence if you will. You may not agree, but that’s what I like to think. Especially in the first quarter of that book, the piece that I wrote after not having written a novel in close to half a decade, the writing style was almost…stunted.

I finished reading “Limits” on my Kindle, and then went back to my tablet and took a week to fix the issues that I noticed when I read at as a book for the first time. Again, I didn’t change any of the story, but I like to think of it as turning the book from an adolescent into an adult. The rough edges are gone, and it’s now ready for the rest of the world.

It was an interesting experience, one I will repeat with all my novels from now on, and I very much appreciated it!