For the last month I’ve been working on re-publishing my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. Actually, I’ve been working on it much longer than that. Last summer I re-read it on my Nook, marking places where I found an error or where I thought the writing could be improved. I did that in anticipation of writing and publishing a sequel to it. Just yesterday I put the finishing touches (I think) on Preserve The Revelation, and will publish it in about two weeks.

I started writing Preserve The Revelation in October, 2012, as part of a four-book trial writing period. PTR didn’t get “selected”, so I worked on other things. Until September 2016, when I picked it up again and began writing. In the summer before that, knowing PTR was coming, I re-read DLA, knowing I would want to re-publish it before publishing PTR. I finished PTR on January 14, 2017, and immediately shifted to DLA.

One of the things I wanted to do with DLA was change places to contractions. Early when I was writing it, I got advice that people back then didn’t talk in contractions, that they were much more formal than that. As a result, I wrote things such as “Let us eat” and “I will go with you tomorrow”, instead of Let’s eat, and I’ll go with you tomorrow. Did people speak and write in contractions in the 1st Century? I don’t know, but I suspect that every era has colloquial ways of shortening their speech. So, in the 1st Century, speaking in Greek or Aramaic, people would have shortened their speech and writing, as we’d say “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” As a result, the most common criticism of DLA was that it was stiff. How much did lack of contractions contribute to that? I figured quite a bit.

When I reread DLA, I found about two dozen typos, but there were hundreds if not thousands of places where contractions would lessen the stiffness of the dialog and narrative. I did search and replace for common word combinations reduced to contractions in English. As a result it shortened the book by over 1,000 words, I think closer to 2,000 words. That was a lot of searching and replacing.

I had that work done in mid-February, and shifted back to PTR for the first round of edits. Once those were done, I went back and forth between the two books. I made the print version file of DLA final, uploaded it to CreateSpace, and waited for the proof to arrive. I started a third round of edits on PTR. The two progressed simultaneously at that point. Last Friday I uploaded the print file of DLA to CreateSpace, after a couple of failed attempts that I didn’t understand, and waited for their automated system to tell me it was okay. That okay came at midnight, so this afternoon I made that my main task. Got it done around 2 p.m.

Well, that wasn’t my only main task. I had to make two last minute changes in the Kindle version. I did that, uploaded it, checked it on the on-line viewer, and saw it had a mistake. So I went through it again, this time getting it right. That was done somewhere around 3 p.m., I think. Then I typed the third round of edits in PTR, which I finished in manuscript Sunday morning (not going to church because of a lingering cold). Those were done around 5:30 p.m., at which time I exited The Dungeon to go upstairs and fix supper.

So, this weekend, while prevented from doing outside work due to my cold and to the rain-snow combination on Saturday, I made major progress on writing. I didn’t work on stocks, or filing. I did complete entries in the checkbook, which had been lost for a week. But except for that, it was all writing, and it felt good. Now, it’s on to making the Smashwords edition, and working on an almost complete short story—as well as finishing touches on PTR, of course.