Insecure Monday: Rewriting In The Past

I don't usually do the Insecure Writing Support Group question though I usually see what it is when Offutt and Alex Cavanaugh do it.  Sometimes then I realize I probably could have done it if I'd wanted to.  Like this one for August: 

 Have you ever written something that afterwards you felt conflicted about? If so, did you let it stay how it was, take it out, or rewrite it?

Something.  Yes.  Whole stories in fact.  Wednesday and Friday I talked about rebooting my Children of Eternity series.  The second book in that original series I completely rewrote in 2012.  Why?  Because the first version sucked.  Hard.  In fact it literally sucked because it involved vampires somehow.  I think there was some kind of thing on the island that Prudence finds and it makes her a vampire and then she makes others vampires.  

The whole thing wound up being pretty stupid and lame.  It was like The Lost Boys in being this cheesy vampire story and it was probably too dark and violent for what was ostensibly a YA series.  So when I decided to release the series on Kindle, I decided to rewrite the second book with something a little more tame.  Since the story is set on a remote island I used sort of a Gilligan's Island plot where someone washes up on the island after a shipwreck.  He meets Samantha and since he's Hispanic like her and she doesn't remember ever seeing anyone like that before, he pretends to be her uncle to find out the secrets of the island.  Ultimately she learns the truth.

The hard part then was to go back and change parts of the next two books so they would jive with the new second book.  There were some parts in those other two I probably should have changed but didn't.  Some of it was probably too "far out" for some people. 

The second biggest example was that I originally wrote a novel called No Matter Who You Are which then became Where You Belong.  NMWYA (named after a Bob Seger song) was written in third-person and it featured a few differences but mostly the same story.  I didn't really love it and decided to rewrite it in first-person and make some changes to the story.

Andrew Leon later accused me of just changing the pronouns and such, which was completely moronic.  I mean, have you ever tried that for one scene let alone an entire 600-page novel?  It's a huge pain in the ass; it was a lot easier to just rewrite the whole book than to try to do that.  And as I said, I changed a few things with the story.  I don't remember exactly what.

Sometimes there are things in Eric Filler stories I wish I would have changed.  The last two books of the Gender Swap Heroes series especially.  Most of the third book just kinda got away from me, though people liked it.  I actually wrote "THE END" when I finished that because I was annoyed at myself and just did not want to even think about any more sequels or spinoffs or whatever.

The problem with the Eric Filler books is the life cycle is so short and I really have no one to answer to.  There's no agent or editor or any gatekeeper besides Amazon and they won't tell you anything for months or perhaps years and even then it's not like they actually read it--or even can read English in general.  It's always disappointing to me that I don't have one of those editors like great writers in the 1920s and 30s had.  The guys like Fitzgerald or Wolfe or Faulkner or whoever where they had an editor who really could help them hone their books and their craft.  Even in the 60s and 70s I think you could still get that.  Nowadays if you can even get an editor, you're lucky if she even bothers to check your spelling.  Mostly she's just selling your book to her bosses so it'll get published.

I'm sure a real editor could have helped to make some of my earlier books better and that might have made me a better writer.  I love Where You Belong and the Scarlet Knight and Chances Are books, but they could have been better.  I could have been better but hindsight is 20/20 so what are ya gonna do?

Now I'm making myself sad again.  Like one time late at night the theme to The Cider House Rules came on a CD or one night a few weeks ago I fell asleep watching Like Sunday, Like Rain and woke up for the end credits.  

And I just got thinking about how I used to want to write literary books.  You know, things that meant something.  But that was a long time ago.  Even if I could think of something now, what would be the point?  No one would buy it.  I'd be lucky to even give it away for free.

Not even a lot of the authors I read in the 2000s are doing much of that anymore.  John Irving is basically retiring now.  John Updike is dead.  Tom Wolfe is dead.  Michael Chabon is mostly working in TV/movies it seems like.  Richard Russo and Richard Ford are mostly writing crappy sequels I don't even want to read.  Last February I read Elizabeth McCracken's latest, which was basically a 200-page fictionalized obituary of her mother; appropriately I listened to most of it going to/from my uncle's funeral.  So at least someone is still doing something worthwhile...for however much longer.

All of that makes me sad.  And very insecure.  Happy Monday.