Ebooks and the unending quest for continuous improvement
This is an offshoot of Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society.
When I first wrote Punk Faction I serialised it as it was written with a new "chapter" going online each week, mainly because that was the only way I could motivate myself to continue with it. At the time it was just a series of slice of life type stories with no real plot.
Later, with about half of them written, I had an idea for a loose plot that would tie all the individual stories together, so I went back through what had already been written and added references/setups for future events. I also had lots of ideas for spinoff stories and added hints to those (a pub landlord who's really a gangster, a missing housewife, a man who throws sacks into the river).
Those went up on Smashwords and Feedbooks (and a few other places) as individual stories with numbers so people would know which order to read them in. When it was finished, I went through it all, fixed any mistakes I found, standardised what clothes people were wearing so that they weren't wearing trainers in one story and then Doc Martens in another one that is supposed to be set a few hours later, etc. I also changed a few characters' motivations for what they did, and added a bit of a back story so that their actions would make more sense. Then they were collected into one ebook for Amazon and given a new cover.
It's had a few minor changes since then, adding a splash of colour to the cover, changing the blurb a few times, and fixing one typo that somehow crept past me. But I always intended revisiting it when I thought I had improved my writing skills enough to do it justice.
Which is what I've now done. I've changed it from being a collection of short stories with a loose connection, to one long story that's about 10,000 words
shorter. Gone are all the references to future stories I'll probably never get around to writing, and all the stories that don't really add anything or didn't
fit in with the overall "style" of the rest of it (those will be rejigged into standalone free stories). I also took onboard some of the criticism from the skinhead community, though it does still contain a lot of characters who don't like skinheads and voice their views on them at every opportunity.
I'll probably revisit it again at some point in the future too, though probably not for a few years at least. So am I evil? Or is this sort of improvement the right thing to do? I doubt I would have kept the interest going long enough to reach this stage if I hadn't released the earlier versions into the wild.
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