Kefren on 1/12/2008 at 09:49

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Hi Rocketman,

I have just gone back to the list of edits made to get an idea of what I had changed and why - I'm happy to send you a full list of what I did, then you can allow or veto each one? The changes were a mix of correcting typos; changing stylistic things sometimes (e.g. replacing '2' with 'two'); and in a couple of places I did more extensive editing. So the passage:

I sat down and enjoyed the simple pleasure. At last I reached the end of the maintenance shaft and found a room that could not be entered for several minutes. Finally I stepped inside to face the music. A cortex reaver lay dead in the middle of the floor, multiple casualties littered the tile floor.


became

I sat down and enjoyed the simple pleasure of eating them, stale as they were. A rare moment of respite.

At last I reached the end of the maintenance shaft and found a room that was still warm from weapons fire. A cortex reaver lay dead in the middle of the floor, metal frame broken and the body that was linked to it charred beyond recognition. Multiple casualties littered the tile floor, lay in their shared pool of blood.


There were other areas where I felt like tinkering, but I kept it to a minimum and only did it in areas that I felt could really be improved with minimal change.

I also altered the reversed paragraph in The Iterative Man, which might be controversial - I thought it was an interesting experiment but the mental act of decoding it broke the immersion of what was otherwise an intense action sequence, and by their nature they need to flow easily. (I have just finished an action horror novel, so those kind of things are on my mind at the moment!) But you are obviously completely right that any changes need to be okay with you, so as I said I am happy to send you a list, or you could copy the text from the PDF and compare it with your original by merging the two documents in some way with differences marked up?

Kolya's legitimate complaint to version one was that I hadn't changed anything, even correcting obvious typos, hence the original impetus to go back in and read everything closely and more critically. I did something similar with Free Radical, making hundreds of changes, and sending a short summary to Shamus. Unfortunately it took me about six months to do all that, because of my own projects also going on in the background!

Kefren on 1/12/2008 at 16:13

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You are right. Apologies to Rocketman et al. I'll revert the text to the 'typos-only' corrected form, and clear all other changes before putting them in the final version.