I’ve been Kindle-izing my first book A Place Without a Postcard. I started it in 1993 on a legal pad and then began typing it into an old Brother word processor, a beast of a machine that was part typewriter, part printer. It had a small screen and a floppy drive too. It was the transition step between typewriters and computers for those of us who couldn’t afford a computer.
Eventually, I got a ’94 Mac Performa and moved the files to that where I was running Claris Works. Then in 2000, around the time I finished the first draft, we made the move to a PC and it went to Word ’95 and then Word ’98. The master file has been through a lot and so the first step in prepping it for Kindle, a device as unimaginable as the cloud when I began, was to clean the source file, which now resides in iPages on my Mac. So I’ve been making changes to the file that never mattered when it was for print only.
But that was the easy piece and was partly a dodge to avoid the real challenge: rereading my ten-year-old novel. Gulp. I don’t tend to reread my stuff once it’s out there, and I had largely forgotten much of what was between those covers, and I shuddered to imagine what horrors I had penned so long ago. Would I want to change it, make major revisions? I didn’t want to.
But I did read it, and it was fun. It was like reading a book by someone else and other than the odd missing comma or unnecessary adverb, I didn’t find that I had to fight the urge to rewrite large sections or change much of anything. There are a few things I might have done differently had I been writing it now, but I’m happy to say I still like the book, and I still really like those old characters, Paul and Sergio and the coyote Mercury for whom this blog is named. I think I told their tale well and did them justice.
The Kindle edition will be out sometime in the next month or so and I’ll also be updating the paperback to a second edition and bringing it to my own Coyote Mercury Press. I’ll keep you posted and let you know when that happens including the free day when I intend to give away the Kindle edition.
Have you ever gone back to read things you wrote and published long ago? What was that like?
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
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