Corrosive Knights, 12/13/18 update: Mechanic (redux)

A few days back (you can read it here) I noted that I was revising Mechanic, the first novel in my Corrosive Knights series…

I wrote back then that I’d announce when the book was revised and listed at Amazon and that day has indeed come.

The Kindle version of the book is online and available (if you bought the book before, you can “reload” it and the new version will appear).  I just posted the paperback version and, hopefully, later today or tomorrow the revised version will be the one available for purchase.

As I noted in the previous column, I decided to “revise” the first book because it had been many years since I last looked at it and figured there were likely things within it -mostly be grammatical/spelling issues- needed to be addressed.  After all these years, I reasoned, I’m likely a better author and given that this is the first book in the series and should be as “good” as it can possibly be, it was incumbent on me to give it one more, and perhaps one last, revision to make sure it was as absolutely good as I could make it.

But what worried me, and what I absolutely DID NOT want to do, was make any major changes to the story.  I also didn’t want to do what George Lucas did with his revisions of the original Star Wars trilogy, add a bunch of new nonsense that didn’t necessarily add to the story and might well slow it down.

I feel I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.

Mechanic, as it stands now, is a slightly shorter novel (the final page count was exactly 1 page less than the original page count!).  The vast majority of things I fixed were small, usually involving unnecessary or awkward words/phrasing.

There were also two pieces of information, one presented in the opening chapter and one later on, which needed to be revised because they didn’t fit in with the continuity I established in later Corrosive Knights novels.  Again, nothing HUGE, just stuff I originally wrote in Mechanic which, as the series played out, was refined for the better and needed to be fixed so that it fit in better with what was to come.

Believe it or not, the dialogue in this book remains at least 95-98% unchanged.  There was one tiny paragraph where a character thinks about something and I feltit  would be better for the character to say this out loud and then have someone else react to the comment.  Humorously, I hope!

But, again, really small stuff.

If you’ve read the book before and you were to read it now, I suspect you’ll wonder why I bothered since, in the end, the changes are smallish.  Its a fair question, but as I also mentioned in the previous posting, I always felt Mechanic was a shark of a novel:  Lean, muscular, without an ounce of fat and slicing through the water like a machine.

The changes made to this book, smallish though they may be, I feel makes it even more like that proverbial shark.

And I couldn’t be happier with the end result.

Give it a try if you haven’t.  It’s a blast! 😉