Interesting thing here is that it’s the first time that I changed something after publishing.
The mention of ‘slushy romance novels’ was originally about kids adventure books. It felt wrong when I wrote it, so I tweaked it, it still didn’t quite seem right, so I published it. First comment I got back was that the juxtaposition of Kay’s thoughts at the window and the books she read as a kid was a bit weird. Obviously.
Now, if that had been the intention, I’d have left it. Done deliberately, that would introduce all kinds of interesting aspects to Kay’s personality. But that wasn’t what the scene was supposed to be about, so it got yanked and replaced with the slushy romance novels, which bring it back to the point I was originally trying to make.
It’s an example of the Wattpad publishing process being embraced, with post-release patches to published material. Subsequent readers will only ever see the patched version. Wattpad and its ilk bring the publishing of fiction much closer, from a distribution perspective, to that of software.
I mean, sure, print books are often tweaked or corrected in subsequent printings. But the initial run containing the errors will always be out there. With Wattpad, nobody would ever know, if I hadn’t written this blog post.
It’s great and awful. Great because it lets the writer finesse the work ad infinitum. And awful because it obfuscates the writing process, and makes the cultural timeline really blurred.
Soundtrack: The Witcher 3 soundtrack. Mainly because the game had just come out and I was entirely obsessed. Though it did add a certain sense of pace to the writing.
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