So Much for Easy!

It seems like yesterday I had what I thought was an amazing idea. I think I’ll revise my first novel and release a ten year anniversary edition. Sounds easy, right? The novel was already written and published. How hard could it be?

In the last couple of months, I have found out how wrong I was. Revising Letters from Linc has not been easy. The fact that the novel is already written didn’t let me just breeze through it and get the sucker released. I am ashamed to admit I thought I was only going to go in and do some copy editing. Correct a misspelled word here. Add missing punctuation there. Remove a few of those unnecessary dialog tags. A few minor changes that I could knock out in a week or so, and I’d be ready to send this novel for formatting.

I was wrong. While I’m not ashamed of being wrong, I am ashamed that I underestimated the work this would take. Having been a professional writer for ten years, I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy, and I’ve been smacked in the face by that the last few months. Yes, I’ve been working on this revision for two months. In my defense, I probably could have finished sooner if I didn’t have a day job, but that doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t realize what I was getting in to.

Letters from Linc was released ten years ago but was written before that. The story is good, and I believe passionately in it, but it’s more than a bit rough around the edges. I won’t go into its shortcomings now since I’ve lamented those in a prior blog, but the fact of the matter is this story needed a complete overhaul. And a complete overhaul is not something that can be accomplished in a few short weeks.

The good news is that I am now in the editing stage of this project. The editing stage is like that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel that I can finally see. After the editing comes the formatting. Then comes the release. Then I start promoting the book and begging for reviews so be prepared for that now.

As daunting as this project has been, as many times as I’ve cursed myself for this idea, I’m not sorry I did it. In the end, I’ll have a more polished work that I can be proud of and the chance to connect with a new generation of readers, but I can say one thing for sure. I’ll think twice about doing something like this again.