Re-re-rewriting

Most writers are unrepentant tinkerers, never really content with how a sentence sounds, let alone how a story goes. Given the chance, they'll change, edit, rearrange, shift, rework, rethink and rehash for the rest of their lives.

I'm one of them.

Deadlines usually save me. To get it out the door (or off the computer) by a certain time, you have to stop tinkering eventually. My rule is that, once it's done, it's done, go, get out, move on, no looking back.

Of course, that doesn't really work with a book. The copy edit comes back, then the proofs, and, arg, the finished product. Which in my mind, and I'm sure in most writers' minds, isn't really finished - it's just the state of the story when an arbitrary deadline arrived.

I try to avoid making too many changes at either the copy edit or the proof stages; the first because I don't necessarily trust myself to be objective - the first time you see the book back, no matter how good it really is, it sucks - and the second because publishers tend to completely freak when you do much more than point out typos.

But lately, I've been confronted with another stage - the excerpt for the web stage. The other day, looking over the first chapter of the new Rogue Warrior book, Dictator's Ransom, I was confronted with a whole bunch of prose that read not the way I wanted it to read. (Kinda like that sentence.)

It was tempting - beyond tempting - to revise it. But would people who then bought the book notice the changes and say, WTF?

I guess there's a philosophical question there: once it's "done," should it really be "done"?

I made a few changes, and probably would have made more, had a deadline not loomed... good thing it's football season, or I might still be tinkering.

And now for the shameless plug: www.dictatorsransom.com