Ever go through a period in your life, where everything conspires to stop you from doing what you want to get done?  Well, I have, and it’s been going on for months now.  I got the first pass done on book 4, and finished the first chapter of the second pass, and then all hell broke loose.  It’s been nothing but one thing after another for months now.  Currently it’s my left eye.  I got iritis in it somehow, so it’s all red and scratchy and out of focus.  Obviously that doesn’t lend itself to editing, so I’m kinda stuck until it gets better.  Hopefully it won’t take a hell of a long time to heal up so I can FINALLY get back to work.  I could sit here and list off all the other crap that’s been keeping me from getting stuff done, but aside from having our car totaled and having to get a new car a while back, most of it’s just personal crap that would take way too long to explain.

In any case, my goal is to get back to work on editing the 2nd edition of book 4 as soon as possible.

After an ungodly amount of time, I finally finished the first pass of the 2nd edition re-edit of book 4 in the series, Revenge.  During the first pass, I added 19,359 words, which is about three chapters worth of material.  The book started at 104,665 words, and is now sitting at 124,024 words after the first pass.  The second pass should go quite a bit faster since most of the heavy editing has been done already.  The second pass usually consists mostly of rewording things, checking for typos, etc…

When I finish the second pass, then I have to make a new cover for it, write a new synopsis, update the author notes, put together the print version, etc…  I still have a ways to go with it, but the main bulk of the work is out of the way now, so at least I’ve made some good progress. 🙂

For some reason, the 2nd edition re-edit of book 4 is taking me a hell of a long time.  I’m frankly embarrassed by how poorly I edited it to start with, so the 2nd edition is going to be a vast improvement over the original.  I’ve only finished chapter 14 on the first pass so far, and I’ve already added over 16K words to it.  To put that into perspective, that’s about 2.75 chapters worth of material that I’ve added so far, and I’m not even done with the first pass yet.  I’ve still got two chapters to go, and then I have to go through it a second time to double check for mistakes, things I want to re-word, things I want to add or embellish upon, etc…

Part of why it’s taken me this long so far is because I’ve been inordinately tired.  I spent most of my days feeling mentally cloudy, and I just can’t edit when I’m like that.  The final product would suffer, and I wouldn’t be happy with the end result, so I just have to edit when I’m clear and thinking properly.  I took this past week off from the gym, both for muscle recovery, and so I could catch up on my sleep, so hopefully now that I’m done with chapter 14, which was a very involved chapter, things will speed up once again.  The chapters with mostly dialog go a lot faster, so now that I’m past chapter 14, which was more descriptive and shorter on dialog, things should speed up once again.  At least, I hope so.  Anyway, I’ll keep plugging away at it.  Then after I finish this one, I’ve only got seventeen more to go. 😛

I took a long break after I finished editing the 2nd edition of the third book, simply because I’ve been having sleep issues again.  I’m only sleeping for a few hours at a time at the most, and when I am awake, I’m lacking the mental acuity to edit properly.  Despite this, I’ve decided to get back to work, taking advantage of whatever times I feel sharp enough to get some of it done.  It’s slowing down the process tremendously, but there’s very little I can do about it.  I did get the first chapter of Revenge re-edited though, and ended up adding almost 1,500 words to it, so I’m pretty happy about that.

Anyway, I’m just going to keep plugging away at it, because I’ve got another seventeen books to do after this one. 😛

Hard drive stopped working in the server, and the most recent back up I had of the site was from June of 2017. I got everything back up and running on a web host now, but there are some general information posts missing. Let me just give you the quick and dirty. Books 1-3 of the Unseen Things series have been updated to 2nd edition, and each is now available in print version as well.  The 2nd edition edits are far superior to my original work, and have a lot of new material included.  If you’ve purchased the ebooks in the past, I kept the same ISBN and ASIN numbers for the 2nd editions, so that people could just update their copy from wherever it was purchased without having to buy a new one.

I just have a few more things to do on the site here, and then everything should be good to go at some point today.

I’m done through chapter 14 on the re-edit, and it’s like a night and day difference in the writing.  I’m super happy with how it’s turning out, and I’m really looking forward to getting it out there so I can get the print version out as well.

Now, be aware that most 2nd editions will have a new ISBN number, and I know technically you’re supposed to do that, but I’m not going to.  I’m just going to reupload the new version on the same number it had before.  That way anyone who’s purchased the books in the past can get the new versions for free just by redownloading them from wherever you bought them.  That way you can get the best of what I’m capable of at this point in my career, without having to pay for a new copy.

As I said before, the later books in the series won’t change as drastically in the writing style, because my style was already well established by the time I got to writing those.  These earlier books however will show a marked improvement.

Also, I’m going to take this opportunity to change a few character names.  Unfortunately, I used the name John twice, the name Mike twice, and the name Billy twice, though the second Billy wasn’t a character, it was just some kid that was mentioned in a memory.  It always bugged me that I did that, and even though I differentiated between John (Derek’s father) and Johnny (Heather’s brother) by using different forms of the name, Mike Hammond, who was introduced in Travelers, and Jeremy’s friend Mike both use the same form of the name.  This was actually not really a flub on my part, because I was planning on making Travelers into a spinoff series when I wrote it, so I didn’t think the two characters would ever be in the same place at the same time.  Well, that all changed, so I’ll be changing Mike Hammond’s name to something else when I get to Travelers, and then I’ll have to change it in whatever subsequent books he appears in.

To be honest, people in real life meet up with people who have the same name as them all the time, and while I like to have a high level of realism in my stories, there’s no excuse for doing that in a book when you have so many different names to choose from.

The nice part is, since there were never print versions of the series, all the print versions will be good to go right out of the gate since they’ll be published after each of the books have been re-edited.

This series is my flagship as an author, and the characters in it are like family to me.  That’s why this 2nd edition project is so important.  I want the entire series to be the best example of my work that it can be, so I’m dedicating the next ten months or so of my life to make sure that happens.