The Second Edition!

You may have come here from my redirect on Amazon.  If so, welcome.  Pull up a chair, grab a beer and make yourself at home.  Hopefully you have all now received your new, shiny, second edition copies of my book but I bet you have some questions right?  Right.  So then; why the second edition?  This is why:

A new version of an existing book might sound a little controversial, and I suppose it is, but there are a lot of factors at play here and many reasons why I think this new version is needed.  For starters, and most simply, this was my first book and I was, certainly at the beginning, a little out of my depth.  The book was written in two main stages, several years apart, and the work that comprises the first 40% or so of the book is in fact much older than the rest.  As a result, my lack of experience shows through far more starkly there as the earlier chapters meander around and are littered with slow, uninteresting sections that drag down the whole pace of the work.  This alone was enough for a new version, but it might have yielded less changes overall.

What has in fact changed in this new daft is as follows:

The book that Jonathan finds is gone.  The book, as a plot device, was never my first choice.  In my earliest drafts of this story, Tel had found a device, left in this world by Ashna, that led him to the first part of the Sword, thus triggering the story.  For reasons I do not fully remember, I could never get this mechanic to work however, so I abandoned it and came up with the idea of a Templar codebook, thus giving J and Dowd something physical and tangible to interact with and giving them something to do in the early chapters.  Unfortunately, this slowed the book down enormously and led to some very long, tedious chapters were they both waded through the encryption.  Moreover, the encryption was just tosh and would never have worked (and my use of the Mousehole in the picture bugged the hell out of me – mouse holes are a product of Tom and Jerry cartoons from the turn of the last century.  An 11^th century priest would never have heard of such a concept!)

Dowd and J both are developed more as characters.  Dowd is painted in a very, very bad light in the first edition.  He is miserably, reactionary and distant, constantly sniping and barking at everyone and this is not what I intended at all and it certainly is glaringly different to the kindly, gentle professor I paint him as in his flashback.  Dowd and J are now old friends from the start, speeding up all their conversations and giving them both a bit more time to shine.  J has stayed much the same but is just given more chance to show his talents.  As a friend said to me, there is no way someone as rich, handsome, successful and determined as J would spend a lot of time alone in bed!

The final change is regarding Alexander.  At the start of the book, Alexander is preaching to his companions about how they all must stay out of the way, not interfere and not tip the scales but not two minutes later, he is knocking on Dowd’s door and handing out cryptic clues and vague hints. Total nonsense.  With the code book gone, Alexander remains in the shadows, only appearing as our heroes exit Mousehole before whisking them off to Italy to tell them just what the hell is actually going on.

So, big changes but changes for the better.  The new plot device that replaces the book is fun and leads to some good comedy and solid interaction and has also allowed me to add back in some cut work, giving Larry a far bigger moment in the spotlight and letting the comic relationship between him and his flunky, Travis, shine through.  All in all, the book moves faster, is more engaging and, thanks to the device, ties better into what I had already written for the sequel, the Keepers of the Fire, which features Ashna’s work quite heavily.  I hope that those who have read the book will forgive me these changes and embrace the fact that they are genuine improvements that do not dramatically alter the structure or events of the book and that you will enjoy the coming two sequels as much as I am enjoying writing them.

Oh – a quick note for those who have found this blog from Amazon:  There appears to be some confusion regarding the process of getting your book onto the Kindle market.  A few people have pointed out that there a fair number of typos in this book, and rightly so.  Let me assure you that I am a more voracious grammar Nazi that any ten people I know and every single one of those errors a) annoys me more than it annoys you and b) is an actual error, not a confusion on my part.  Amazon offers no help whatsoever in the formatting and editing of your book, it is all down to you.  I am far from being a good typist and so, between fat fingers and an overly enthusiastic spellchecker, there were errors galore in the first, complete draft of this book.  I have done my best to correct them all but, at the end of the day, this book is nearly 200,000 words long and I am not a professional copy editor.  There comes a point where you are simply snow blind to your own work, so I would ask that you cut me and all the other hard working, amateur authors out there some slack.  I own books half the size of mine that have been republished 20+ times that still have errors in them, so that there are so few (comparative to its size) in mine is a miracle.

All that said, I hope you guys enjoy the new version.  With that done, I can get around to writing the second part and hopefully get it published before you all stop caring.  Speak to you all soon!