Rewriting the Pathways of Light and Stone

I’ve been working as a freelancer editor for years, and one of the things I always tell my clients is to avoid endlessly rewriting the same book. Fix what can be fixed, then move on, and your next book will be better. However, I suddenly found myself in the other side of this conversation; after I handed my book to my wife and one of my dear friends “just to proofread,” as I thought, what I took back made me realize that I couldn’t just fix the worst issues and publish it.

The second book of my Mages’ Guild series, the Pathways of Light and Stone, was written shortly after I finished the first. However, I pushed myself quite hard to write it, especially in the beginning, and the quality suffered significantly. Additionally, it had several issues that I as the writer could clearly see, and I knew their causes as well, and those issues were apparent even to the reader. So, would I rewrite it from scratch, as it needed, or would I patch it and send it?

Well, as the title of this post clearly states, you probably know that I did rewrite it. It took me about a year, but the result was something that I knew I could stand behind. I’m not as proud of this book as I was of my previous one, the First Mage, but the final product is indeed something that I’ve worked hard on, and have polished as much as I can, with my current skills and knowledge. It still has some issues, and I’m sure that if you read the book critically you’ll spot them right away, but I’ve done my utmost best to write an engaging story for you, and one that I wanted to tell.

Some issues are built into the series itself. This is a story I want to tell from beginning to end and I will do so. I won’t abandon it, despite its shortcomings. I’ve been working on this for years, and I definitely want to see it through. At the same time, I’ll be writing one-offs and working on other series that I’ll try to create without those problems–of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t have problems of their own. The opposite, actually.

In the end, there are no perfect books. Even the books you or I consider masterpieces, I’m sure their writers would find riddled with flaws.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. My links are at the usual place if you want to reach out to me.