I’ve recently been working on updating my Courting Series. I’ve been changing everything back to “American” English from the “British” English in which the books were originally published, and something interesting has been happening. As I’m proofreading, I’ve been noticing sentences that don’t sound like me or even individual words I don’t like. Nine times out of ten when I go back to my original manuscript, I’m finding that these are things that were changed in the editing process. It’s gotten to the point where it’s freaky. I’ll read a sentence and think “that doesn’t flow right” and boom. It turns out that was a sentence that a line editor re-structured. These aren’t grammatical or punctuation errors that were fixed. I’ll stumble through some dialogue and think “something is missing,” and I’ll discover that a word was removed or changed… and not because it was a translation thing like “lift” versus “elevator.”
What’s even more interesting to me is that it’s been four years since I worked on the first book in the series. Four years since I’ve even looked at the story itself. The stories are fresh to me as if I was reading somebody else’s work, yet these blips stand out like sore thumbs. At first I thought it was odd, but the more I considered it, the happier it made me. I know myself. I know how I would write something. My style has matured to the point it’s indelibly “me.” And guess what?
Everything is being changed back to the way I want it.