RENEWING THE MAQLÛ

“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.”

Lao-Tzu

I haven’t posted in quite a while, as I’ve been busy rewriting and republishing my books.

It all started when I was finishing up book 4 – The Chintamani. I realized my writing style had evolved and that I was being more ruthless with my editing – and it sounded much better. About the same time, my youngest daughter gave my books to her neighbor, a voracious 10-year-old reader. His feedback was both heartening and disheartening. The good news was that he said my series was his third favorite book series – right after Harry Potter and Percy Jackson (good company😊). The bad news was that he also said that, “I got a little repetitive at times.” Since I’d begun thinking the same thing, I decided to edit book 1, chapter 1, to see the difference.

The changes were relatively simple, but it read so much better that I decided to look at chapter 2. The same thing happened. Seeing the differences between the original version and the updated one was so exciting that I flew through re-editing book 1. The result was that I took out over 2% of the words and made it a harder-hitting, more readable book. Then, I did the same thing with books 2 and 3.

But that wasn’t the end of my republishing experience. I also decided to publish Large Print Dyslexic Friendly editions of each book which meant I had to learn how to meet Dyslexic readers’ needs. Large print is easy. Dyslexic formatting is much more complicated, requiring me to change fonts, sizes, formatting, spacing, etc. It also meant I had to create new artwork (notice the banner has a different fstyle vs. the rest of the cover).

It took me a while to accomplish all this work, and since I’m not a multi-tasker, I had to cut out something – my posting.

Hope you enjoy the newer versions. I know I like them a lot better.

Large Print Dyslexic Friendly Cover of The Palantir.