Baby didn't look quite as I'd hoped when I lifted her Kindle blanket so I decided to do some additional work. As with any child, it's very hard to know when to stop interfering and let them be. Each time I go back and read something I've written there is a word or phrase that still niggles. Sometimes it's because I've become overattached to a metaphor and I'm going to shoehorn it in whether its right or not; sometimes the pace is wrong, or the word not quite accurate enough.
But absence makes the art grow stronger. After a couple of weeks I finally downloaded and read my own book as a new reader would. I read the first page and knew I had to fix it. Luckily with e-books you can make changes and then upload again. I spent two night playing with words, paragraphs and rhythms until it felt right. It's the first page after all, it's got to grab the reader and give an immediate sense of the book's style and mood.
You might think that to have got to the stage of publication and not sorted the first page was somewhat remiss but I assure you, that page had been worked and reworked more than a hundred times - and that is the problem. Like a piece of pastry it had become overworked and grey. It had lost it's spring and I'd lost the ability to see it.
The new beginning I hope, has the reader actively involved with the earthquake along with the character; in the first edition the reader was watching along with the character which I think was less effective. If you have bought it already and want to read the new beginning use "Look Inside" feature on Amazon. (And by the way this is about the fifth version of this post, having found numerous changes were required when I looked at it this morning.)
