It has been a long haul. What started out as an exercise to republish one of my first self-published books has taken just over twelve months, a lot of rewriting, some major revisions and excisions of around half the chapters. The end result - essentially a 'new' book. It has been a very interesting exercise, not least because I have had the advice of a professional editor. Janet has analysed the book, identified what its shortcomings were, what its strengths were, and what was necessary to fix it.
So, my idea of simply republishing the original and getting it up on Kindle and as an e-book unravelled fairly rapidly. What we have now is around 50% a new book. That required a new title, a new cover, and lots of thought about what Janet was saying was needed. So the whole first half of the book is new and takes the reader back to Harry's childhood and through his growing ambition to go to sea. Working with Janet the book has been transformed. In the process I have learned a great deal about this art. The original story, while good, lacked completeness. Now it has that.
Janet's edits have improved the flow of the story, tidied up the text, improved the dialogues and sorted out several of the things that I, in my inexperience and coming from a 'technical writing' background had done, which are not done in fiction. It's been a big learning curve in how to revise a book. I think it has been a worthwhile one. I just wish I'd known a lot of these little things when I wrote it originally.
So, here it is, the rewritten, reworked, expanded Harry Heron; Midshipman's Journey. It is now available on Kindle, in paperback and on all the other ebook formats. It can be ordered from bookstores like W H Smith or Waterstones - in fact, I hope you do.
