I Am Not Pulling a George Lucas! I Swear!

I had a comment to my last post that was really quite sweet. I appreciate hearing from fans that loved As The World Dies. It's very encouraging to have that kind of support when doing something as crazy (or not so crazy) as self-publishing. Knowing that there are fans out there dying for this story in novel form is the major reason I chose to do this.

But the question was asked (as it has been by others) as to how the story was being changed. From Glenn's comment "The question I have, are you going to change much of the story when you do self publish? Just curious. Personally (and of course you're the author and know what you want) I think the story is EXCELLENT and really doesn't require much changing."

I have to admit that portion made me giddy.

As The World Dies has several things happening to it. Let me explain.

First, the original online story ended up being well over a 1,000 pages long and around 300,000 words. In other words, it was one massive huge gigantic enormous wowzer of a tome. I had been considering printing it out, but when I realized how massive it was I decided it was time to figure out how to manage it. As I was looking through the story, I realized there were three naturally occurring "endings". In fact, during the writing of the story twice fans thought the story was over when it was actually not. So I chopped up the book into three sections.

Upon rereading the story, I realized that scenes I thought were in the story, actually were not. These were actually important scenes that gave further depth to the characters and I was bummed when they were not there. But I have to give myself a break since I was writing on the road and sometimes had no Internet connection to double check what I had previously written on the forum. At that time, I never imagined I would make As The World Dies into a novel, let alone a trilogy. If I had, I may have taken greater measures to not let anything fall through the cracks plot wise or with character development. In the new version, these scenes are included. I am not taking anything out of the story or removing any characters.

It's not until the third book that readers of the original will see any major scenes added. When I wrote what was to be the last novel in the trilogy, I admit, I was rushing to be done. I had a lot of negative things happening in my life at that time and the darkest part of the series does come in the final book. I deliberately left out a huge, dramatic event in Jenni's story because I just didn't want to go there with her. Yet, it was an important part to her development. It will be restored in this version.

Also, someone who was supposed to die (and I let him/her live) was left alive because I just didn't feel like killing anymore characters. I broke my sacred rule of "if they die on the movie screen in my head, they die in the book". I was just emotionally wrung out at that point and didn't want to do it. This time around they are going to die. And I ain't telling who it is.

Finally, the book is being edited for spelling, grammar, etc. I am also doing research on things I glossed over before.

So what does the revision actually mean? A tighter, better written story. Nothing is coming out, but things are going in. Things that make SENSE. None of that Han Solo shoots second in the revised version of Star Wars.

'Cause, as you long time fans know, Jenni ALWAYS shoots first.