The Challenges of Updating My Novel for a Second Edition

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This month BWL published a new edition of my first novel, Deadly Fall. BWL chose to title the book, A Deadly Fall, in part to distinguish the new release from the original. I have long wanted to update Deadly Fall, to bring the time frame in line with the sequel, Ten Days in Summer. Deadly Fall was set in 2004. Due to the years it took me to find BWL, Ten Days in Summer wasn’t published until 2017. I asked BWL publisher Jude Pittman if I should make the sequel’s story contemporary and Paula, my protagonist, thirteen years older? Or set the sequel in 2005, making it almost historical? Jude advised me to set Ten Days in Summer in 2017, but pretend it was taking place ten months after the original Deadly Fall.

“No one will notice,” she said.

Jude was right. Nobody who has read both books has questioned me about Paula and the world’s peculiar aging. I wish I could be lucky enough to age like Paula. 

For the original Deadly Fall, I was specific about the story year and referred to events of the day, such as the Iraqi hostage crisis and the jail sentencing of household guru, Martha Stewart. I even kept my local newspapers to make sure the story weather matched that of my real-life story setting, Calgary, Alberta. This was a mistake, I realized later, since Calgary enjoyed an unusual period of mild weather those September weeks in 2004. Calgary’s typical fall swings between warm and freezing, sunshine and snow, would have added interest to the story.

Since I didn’t want to radically change the second edition, I kept the mild weather from the original and found that it fit a story theme. A Deadly Fall ends with a forecast of a radical weather change, which symbolizes the changes to Paula’s life ahead as a result of the murder. I had to update the news references for the 2016 story, but tried to keep them more general. Syrian refuges arrived in Canada that summer, which they did in other years. 

As I worked through my revision of 2004 Deadly Fall, I realized how much the world changed in those twelve years. Paula, like me, was a little old-fashioned regarding modern technology. But in 2016, her answering machine with a tape-recorded message had to go or she’d be totally out of date. She did keep her land line phone and daily newspaper delivery, although the Calgary newspaper she receives dropped its Sunday edition sometime between 2004 and 2016. This newspaper also abandoned its ‘Community' section, but its re branded ‘You’ section works for Felix, a secondary character who writes a weekly column.

In 2016, the television program Cheers didn't appear in afternoon reruns. I changed this to Modern Family. The Canadian penny disappeared from monetary circulation. Paula no longer has a flip-open cell phone. She watches Blu-rays and Isabelle, a secondary character, works in a music store, not a video store.

I had to change numerous cultural and personal references for Paula, who is now born twelve years later than she was in the original book. Paula used to be a baby boomer, with typical attitudes of a child of the sixties. Now she’s born in 1964, past the boomer wave, with different memories of music and world events that shaped her life. 

The new release also allowed me to correct small mistakes that slipped past my first publisher’s proof-reader. Missing words like ‘a’ or ‘the’ and absent punctuation marks; the word pate that should have been plate and reign vs rein.

But my most critical editing task was fixing formatting errors caused by converting the PDF file of the published Deadly Fall to a workable WORD document. The conversion resulted in some odd fonts. Acronyms like TV, DVD, ID, BC and SUV appeared in lower case. Hyphenated words at the end of a line left out the hyphen. The WORD document omitted scene breaks and italics and often broke lines mid-sentence, or didn’t start a line of dialogue on a new line. 

I poured through the document with eagle eyes and had my husband do a final proof-read. After he caught my archaic penny reference, I had my character flip a quarter instead. Between us, I hope we caught everything and helped BWL produce a better book for new readers to my Paula Savard mystery series.   

          

Once Again, Authors Should Thank the British by Karla Stover

                

I'm not sure that "Spotters" are as popular in my neck of the woods as they seem to be elsewhere. Our weather is innocuous enough to pretty much eliminate storm spotting, and we don't have the types of tornadoes that are so beloved on YouTube. Tacoma came into existence thanks to the Northern Pacific Railroad, but I've never seem anyone trainspotting. I used to see people watching planes come and go at Joint Base Lewis McChord, the nearby military base, but the threat of terrorism seems to have put paid to that activity, and besides, my husband says its illegal. Also, back in the day, people would sit at the border of SeaTac Airport to watch planes, but I haven't been there, lately and can't give an update. Wikipedia calls a person who enjoys watching activity on canals in the United Kingdom a gongoozler. Apparently, they "harbor an interest in canals and canal life, but do not actively participate." There are 18,241 canals in the United States but I've never heard of anyone watching them. But road geeks, aka Roads Scholars, 😁 like roads less travel and regularly take road trips. All this watching/spotting is by way of introducing the Cloud Appreciation Society, cloud spotters, as it were.

A British author named Gavinj Pretor-Pinney founded the society in 2005, and it has approximately forty-six thousand members in one hundred and twenty different countries. Their aim is to "foster understanding and appreciation of clouds." The society's homepage, cloudappreciationsociety.org has a gallery of photographs submitted from all over the world. Also, in 2005, Yahoo named the society the most weird and wonderful find on the internet." (I couldn't find Yahoo's list).

For authors and readers, how many books can there be that don't mention clouds? Whatever the weather--sunny, stormy, windy, etc. they are almost always part of the written text. TheAtlantic.com calls clouds "the most useful metaphor of all time." because they can shape-shift to meet any situation.

Joni Mitchell must have agreed when she sang about clouds getting in her way and going on to say:

"I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud's illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all."

Describe it!

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As a writer, it’s my job to use description well so my readers can see the world I’m creating and feel as if they actually know the characters as people next door, from work, or co-riders on the subway. There are millions of words for describing the taste, smell, feel, look and sound of everything and it really shouldn’t be a problem. Right?


Last week, I asked my niece for her mom’s chicken tetrazzini recipe. I love it and wanted to make it for my family. One of the ingredients is cooking sherry and it’s not something I keep on hand. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever used it in a recipe. So off to the store I go. After wandering the aisles looking in what I thought were the obvious places, I stopped a clerk.


“Can you tell me where the cooking sherry is?”


He frowned, then said, “Describe it.”


Huh? “It’s sherry…that you cook with.”


He had no idea but suggested I go to the front of the store to customer service.


Again I asked, “Can you tell me where the cooking sherry is?” Now mind you, this is a major grocery store chain; not a small back woods convenience store.


The man behind the counter checked his computer then said… “Describe it.”


You would think the name was description enough, but doing better this time, I said, “It’s liquid and comes in a bottle.” Thinking that could be probably 30% of the store contents, I added, “It’s sherry you use for cooking. You could probably drink it but it doesn’t have alcohol in it.” (Misconception on my part, as it’s 17% alcohol by content yet it’s not in the liquor department.)


He said it might be in aisle 3 so we headed that way. As he was perusing the shelves, I pulled out my phone and texted my niece, asking her where the cooking sherry was located. (I’m in Kansas and she’s  across the country in New York, but I figured … well, I’m not sure but the odds were she knew as much as my store clerks as she had used it before.) Just as she answered the clerk came from the aisle next to where I was standing with a bottle of cooking sherry.


I’m not sure there’s a morale to this story unless it’s to have someone else do your grocery shopping because in the time I spent wandering the aisles, I picked up several food items that looked good but I didn’t really need. All this for 4 tablespoons of cooking sherry.


****

Describing characters in my novel “An Interlude” was easier because Peter and CJ were so real to me. Stuffy, uptight New York businessman Peter didn’t like his need for southern bred, New Orleans contractor CJ, but she was in charge of the restoration of his great-aunt’s house and he would put up with her. Except that meant being around her on a daily basis and he soon began to feel the pull of what could only be bayou magic.


Grab a copy of “An Interlude”, as ebook or in print at my favorite publisher, Books We Love. http://bookswelove.net/authors/baldwin-barbara-romance/


Visit my website for more great reading with contemporary, historical and time travel romantic stories. http://www.authorsden.com/barbarajbaldwin


Thanks for reading,
Barb