Re-Editing Dread Veil Because Good Lord
“I have to leave it as is and move on.” was not the brightest of ideas.
Dread Veil is getting a second edition with a bunch of fixes, apparently KDP kept renewing without me realizing it so I can’t republish it until the 10th of this month when that expires. I’ll get two PDF versions as purchasable on this site, both light and dark versions, then maybe a Kindle version on Amazon. I say maybe because the Kindle software wrecks havoc on how I like to do formatting. If nothing else I’ll just put a PDF version up on Amazon as well.
When I first published Dread Veil it was after going through it at least 4 different times, front to back, and doing all of the editing myself. Normally you’d hire an editor to do this for you since they’d catch everything you don’t notice, but there’s only two people I’d trust to do that and they’ve got lives to live. I ain’t hiring an editor from online because:
I don’t know them.
I don’t trust some rando to not change things unnecessarily or modify the work to fit their agenda.
“Oh dear you used the R word, that’s problematic.”
“Oh no there’s not enough unsubtle political jabs at current thing.”
“This needs more snarky quips haha oh that’d be so quirky.”
I don’t have the oil baron money required to pay someone to edit 1182 goddamn pages.
I don’t have the time to be doing a constant back and forth over email to get the work done.
Rather than doing that and then having to run it through a text comparison tool to review changes, I can do it myself. Admittedly doing it myself didn’t produce the most ideal of results which I’ll go over, but then there’s another reason.
I write because it’s a hobby and one I enjoy doing, it isn’t some prospective career I’m trying to pivot towards. I’m not going to pay someone else to do my hobby for me, and I can learn how to get better by making mistakes (such as publishing a book with all those errors in it).
To the main point of all this, after first publishing the book something kept bothering me. I had decided I would leave it as is to avoid going into some endless spiral of constantly editing until I died of inevitable brain cancer, yet I had this constant nagging feeling. After the book was published I went into the roach motel known as “world building” where I started adding to an already existing encyclopedia of lore, details and backstory. This was so I had a consistent source of info I could use for the next books rather than making it up as I went along, which can result in either highly imaginative works or an autistic person’s hellscape where nothing is consistent. I already had a first book so it wasn’t like I was someone that spent 30 years writing lore for a story that had yet to exist.
Throughout this process I started coming up with ideas I felt were better, so eventually I realized I’d need to go back and edit the first book to add all of this in. And upon opening the document back up to make those edits, I finally found the sources of all those nagging feelings.
Lord have mercy the amount of spelling mistakes, grammar issues, format problems, and general fuckery was surprising to find. You’d think reviewing it 4 times in a row before publishing would catch all of that but no, it’s 1182 pages of course there’d be mistakes.
So here’s a quick overview of the more notable changes, though it was mostly a lot of misspellings or extra words in the vein of “the the” or “the are”.
The Reddit “Err…” Purge
The fact I put any single goddamn instance of “Err…” in this thing should have resulted in a sentencing date.
“Err… aktually you see it’s not Linux, it’s-” may the good Lord have mercy, that single phrase makes any character seem like they walked off the set of a capeshit movie. That character cries watching trailers for SuperBungus the Quirkboy Wonder. That character says “That’s… not how that works, bud.” when addressing the antagonist. That character declares “Err… well that just happened.” because you dear reader need to know that was a goofy and really silly moment, wasn’t that so out of the ordinary?
The fact there’s a permanent record of that now in the book’s first edition is just straight ass, but at least it’s gone now.
That Really Stupid Pointless Story Aspect with Dr. Acris Baddarick
To put it simply, I referred to Dr. Baddarick as “they” because it was going to be some “Oh gee I wonder” aspect to the story. It’d eventually culminate in a later book where I reveal whether Acris was a dude or a chick during an intense story moment that was going to involve killing a celestial entity using a Golgothic weapon.
That was really fucking retarded from the get-go and that’s been fixed.
Acris keeps himself covered up and his voice distorted because he directly contributed to the deaths of millions, he’s paranoid someone might recognize him and put a bullet in his skull for what he did during the Gargoth War.
AcknowegleAcknowlege Acknowledged
I somehow misspelled acknowledge every single time. I have no idea how I managed that one.
Chief Security Officer Ye-Iun
Because I have the eyesight of a bowling ball, I had misspelled Ye-Jun as Ye-Iun numerous times.
Lana’s Lances
That’s getting a rename.
Maintenance Layer
For some reason I wasn’t writing Maintenance Layer as a proper noun.
The Nahli-Oda Counseling Session
You ever done any kind of drawing or 3D modeling? There’s this odd phenomena where you’ll draw up something, or make a mechanical part in Blender, and something seems off. You step back from the screen, squint your eyes and come to one of two conclusions.
Yep, that’s a penis.
Yep, that’s a vagina.
At one point I was doing the 3D model for the Shepherd, and upon examining the respirator model I realized I was looking at a uterus.
Anyway, the Nahli-Oda counseling session in chapter somehow ended up as an immensely unsubtle and unintended sex allegory.
“Don’t break him Nahli.”
“Oda was breathing heavy.”
“Don’t you dare stop.”
“This shit gets me hot and bothered.”
I tried to salvage it as best I could because that certainly was not the point of it.
The Great Wall of No Paragraphs
It takes a certain person to want to read a 1182 page book (which is the first in a series) but even then, your eyes are gonna start glazing over if there are no breaks between paragraphs. Did my best to break up things a little more so there’s room to breathe so to speak.
General Clarifications (The “I Should Have Thought That One Through” Revisions)
There’s a number of places where upon re-reading, a few details don’t make sense. When you’re writing science fiction it’s fine to make up concepts that aren’t realistic, that’s why it’s fiction. But it has to make sense in the setting you’ve developed without breaking your own rules. Magic woohoo space dust that lets a person jump into the stratosphere without dying from their organs exploding like water balloons is fine, so long as there’s precedence for the concept within the story itself. An aircraft hitting Mach 20 works if you establish why that’s possible within your own bullshit.
There’s a number of areas where I went through and tuned that up, one of them being the fact Bladehearth is located within the Secondary Layer of the Celestial Throne. Traversing to another layer requires manipulating Chaff, or Gale, or [REDACTED] which the original denizens of Bladehearth can’t do. So how’d they get there? Well Bladehearth can do that, but how’d that happen in the first place? How do they leave when they need to go to the Top Layer of the Celestial Throne?
Small questions that needed some answers, which were done throughout the book.
In Conclusion
New edition will be published soon in light and dark versions, maybe Kindle but that’s a troublesome format.
If you already bought the first edition and want the new version, email me at GDSVarith@protonmail.com and I’ll get it to you.
No receipt or anything required, I’m not charging someone twice for the same product, that’s asinine.
I have yet to get physical copies made since it’s 1182 pages long and the companies who would take that risk on an unknown series are few and far between. It doesn’t make good business sense and it may be physically impossible, but who knows.
I’m considering an audiobook version but I would likely end up doing it myself because I ain’t paying a studio $900k or whatever just to have a character sound like the protagonist from a dubbed shonen anime.
LibreOffice Writer has a better spellchecker than MS Word.
Making mistakes leads to improvement, but don’t use that as the be-all excuse for shitty editing work.
Just because you spent a long time working on something doesn’t mean it’s good or worthy of success, you earn that by making quality material that others find enjoyable.
Yes, I am working on the next novel in the series.
No, I don’t have an idea on when that’ll be done.
Yes, it won’t be 1182 pages long.
Yes, it will probably result in a similar article like this when I discover I spent the entire novel misspelling restrant restaurant.