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Sunday, April 24, 2011

O'Shea Classic Mostly

After a week off from work, I head back tomorrow. We're required to use our vacation or lose it by our company anniversary date now and I have another week to use up before May 9th, so there is another stay-cation in my near future. This time, though, I wasn't on deadline and I had plans to get things done around my house. How did I do?

Not so great actually.

I discovered that I need a To Do List. It's too easy for me to get distracted otherwise. I, um, never did write one up for this week although I should have when I realized how easy it was to go oooh, shiny.

The week wasn't a total dearth of progress, however.

I got rid of my rusted out shower caddy and bought (and assembled) a new one. I also got a new shower head with both a stationary head and a hand-held head so that it will be easier to clean. 

I had my first four books scanned because my electronic files weren't up to date and I did finish going through one of them and fixing what I saw. It goes to my mom next for another read through with the thought that if I missed something she'll catch it. Hopefully.

The list does look pretty sad, doesn't it?

What was kind of interesting about going through the first book I ever published was seeing how I've changed as a writer. And because I hadn't read Ravyn in such a long time, I'd forgotten a ton of stuff. I realized, too, that it would be a drastically different book if I was writing it today as opposed to what I wrote back then.

It was also really, really, really, really hard not to edit as I went along.

I made the decision to not revise my backlist stories, that I'd consider them O'Shea Classic, but wow, I wanted to. A lot in some places.

I did revise a few sentences back to the way I originally wrote them because they'd been changed to things I didn't care for a whole lot. The run-on sentence that made me grit my teeth? Gone. The added word that changed the meaning of my sentence? Gone.

Another sentence had words cut from it that didn't exactly change the meaning, but did kind of change the shading of it. Those were added back. Also added was Alex's correct rank. The fact that he was a lieutenant colonel and not a full colonel was cut, too. Oh, and I added in a mention of the pyramid, because it plays such a prominent role in Eternal Nights. The small fixes were actually pretty fun and it was a revelation to realize I could change a few things.