The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) (23 page)

(You might now be thinking I still don't have the skill to do that, in which case rest assured that I am, even now, shaking my fist in impotent rage at you.)

"What it needs," my editor said, "is more of a mystery around her death. There need to be false leads, mistakes, things to leave the reader guessing who was behind it. Right now it's too direct, too A to B."

Which was fair enough in its way, but meant I had to turn the story into more of a whodunnit, and the nature of the set-up I'd left myself with was that the only people capable of locating "suspects" would be the police. This meant a whole lot of Alex hanging out with cops, being very chummy all together, while they worked the case, and while the nature of Flint and Saric as damaged and bent officers meant it was sort of blaggable, it was very much a push. If real cops did the things those in the published version of the book did, they'd be fired. And probably prosecuted.

(On Amazon UK, as I recall, there's a reader review criticising this very thing, and they are
entirely
correct.)

And even with all that, in the end the explanation for what had happened still boiled down to Alex's meeting with Randy. All the nonsensical puff of riding around with the police didn't actually add anything to the story's resolution. All it did was make the whole thing less believable and less focused. The points when it hit the right notes were further apart, and I think the tension within it suffered from watering-down.

The rights to the books reverted to me a couple of months ago, and I decided I wanted to hack them into shape and make them the way they should've been if (a) I'd been a better writer back then and (b) I'd been less inclined to play safe and do exactly what my editor said. (And (c) not have to worry about word count because a physical book on a real shelf in a real store was not the aim. This is a real consideration for print works which has no relevance at all in the digital realm.)

It's been a surprising amount of work (not least because I'd managed to lose my original documents and had to scan everything page-by-page using my phone, then correct all the errors by hand; never, ever lose the files on your computer, kids). The end result is much more what I'd been aiming for. It's greatly stripped down - about 30% shorter than the Penguin edition - and loses the cruft. I rewrote some sections from scratch either by necessity or by taste, and gave the text a thorough polishing. I'm happy with the result, and it's a shame I couldn't make it this way in the first place.

As I write this, I'm now working on a similar, though less arduous, polish job for the writer's cut of the next book,
The Darkness Inside
, before I move on to the third, and then new tales in the series beyond.

You might, if you knew the Penguin editions, also be wondering what the other Penguin/St Martins Minotaur Alex Rourke story you can see on Amazon is, this "Winter's End" thing, why, if that book was the earliest of them, I'm now referring to this one right here as the first of the new series, and whether or not it still fits in somehow. The answer is that you might think of it as the pilot episode for a TV series, with the actual series itself beginning here. Reading it won't do any harm, though I don't rate the book much, but is also completely unnecessary; character establishment and all the rest is done in this story.

I don't, as it happens, have the rights to WE. I wondered once if I did, what material I'd keep when putting together a new cut of it. And the answer was: almost nothing. People seem to like it well enough, but it's very first-booky, the second half of the plot is 99% cheese, I can't stand the finale, and the bulk of the talking-to-the-villain stuff in the first half of it reads, as much as I was deliberately trying to avoid it at the time, like a
Silence Of The Lambs
knock-off. I'm a far, far better writer now than I was then, so it's a touch on the ropy side to say the least. By all means look at it — there's no awkward retconning of the background between the old editions and these ones — but I'd rate it as a curio, no more.

Re-examining and refreshing a long-ago novel like this has been an interesting experience and something that I think has probably only been possible since the rise of digital publishing. While texts have changed between print editions in the past, it's largely been the case that the changes are small or that the editions are short-run collectors' items. Reissuing a book in a vastly changed re-edited form for mass consumption is not something I think I've seen before.

I don't recommend hand-scanning an 85,000-word novel using a phone, though. Ever. Anything but that.

Whether you like the book or hate it, you can find me on Twitter as
@Nameless_Horror
or online at
http://namelesshorror.com
, where I'm quite happy to be showered with abuse, or praise, or pictures of cats.

- John R., November 2012.

Copyright John Rickards 2012.

Cover image: ‘
Shandra Stephenson
’ by Sylvia McFadden, used under a cc-by license.

Writing as John Rickards:

The Darkness Inside: Writer’s Cut (coming soon)

Burial Ground: Writer’s Cut (coming soon)

The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned (coming soon)

Writing as Sean Cregan:

The Levels

The Razor Gate

Murder Park

All You Leave Behind

Hardboiled Jesus (short story)

Wishes (short stories)

The Unpublishable (short stories)