I mentioned in the last post that I used Dragon to transcribe my novella so that I'd have an up-to-date version. One of the things that ended up surprising me was that it felt as if I was reading someone else's work.
Once, I regularly reread my work because I love my characters and liked revisiting with them from time to time, but lately, as in the last few years, I haven't had enough time. The novella I transcribed? I probably haven't read it since it came out in 2007.
Maybe the 4 years without reading it is why it felt like someone else had written it. Or maybe it was the weirdness of reading it aloud instead of reading quietly. Either way, it was a surreal experience.
What was nice about it was that I didn't try to edit it. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to stop myself from rewriting my backlist stories even though I vowed I wouldn't. I did change one word. I used happening twice in one paragraph, but other than that, I had no urge to fiddle. Definitely a plus since I'm a perfectionist leaning toward anal perfectionist.
I hope this holds true as I go through the scans of the books. The novella was written closest to my current writing style/ability and the books are earlier. I'd like to not feel any desire to tinker beyond fixing a few things that got changed that I didn't care for--a clunky, run-on sentence, a sentence that had a few words cut out of it that made it less musical and changed the meaning slight. Things like that.
I also am going to add the missing pyramid to Ravyn's Flight. No one ever called me on that, but, well, ouch! I didn't know there was a pyramid when I wrote the first book, but learned it was there in the second Jarved Nine book. I guess Ravyn and Damon didn't care about the pyramid. ;-)
Stay tuned for more exciting backlist book action. :-)
