E-Books Aren’t for Writers with OCD

It took me a while to get my e-books up on the system at Amazon, and then at Smashwords. It wasn’t that it was so all-fired complicated to do, although it took a few uploads before the layout and everything was to my satisfaction. It was easy enough to format for Kindle: All I had to do was convert it to an HTML document, and then follow their detailed instructions. Smashwords, which converts the books to the formats for Sony, Nook, iPad, and smart phones, as well as for their own sale, took a little more finessing with Word, but it was easy once I got the hang of it.

No, the big problem of launching manuscripts into electronic format is keeping your hands off the copy while you go over it. As Paul Valery (or DaVinci, or Truman Capote, or someone else, according to my extensive web research) once said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Well, with e-books, that doesn’t have to be the case now! A writer can upload revisions to his or her ebook continually. The tweaking could be endless!

I’m lucky. I had a little guideline I could follow. Since these were ebooks of volumes that had already been released, changing much copy would put me in danger of creating a book that people wouldn’t recognize when they bought it. I could have updated some references from 15 years ago (When writing the original, I thought it was funny to make Scrooge aware of the passage of time by his buzzing alarm-wristwatch. Wow, very Dick Tracy! How was I to know that I should’ve made it his cell phone? I’m not a visionary like Steve Jobs). But most of the cultural references were still valid. I don’t think I mentioned anything that screamed “Clinton Era” too much. No talk of tech bubbles or “Celestine Prophecy”.

Worse, it was sorely tempting to heavily edit some of the stories in Once Upon a More Enlightened Time. They tend to ramble on, I think, and become shaggy dog stories. Because they had been read on stage, most of the stories in Politically Correct Bedtime Stories were shorter, punchier, and clearer in what they were making fun of. But If I had begun to edit the stories to any great extent, the e-book would probably never have made it in front of the public.

So, for better or for worse, the books in the Politically Correct Storybook are almost exactly as they were when they were published in 1994-5. I was tempted to insert a new introduction for one or all of them, but then what would I do with the original introductions, which I think are pretty funny and set the tone for the books almost perfectly? Can you insert an older introduction into an addendum? Is it still an introduction if you do that? To keep things from getting messy, I chose to keep things just as they had been. Whether the books are museum pieces or still have something to say to people, is the decision of the reader.

Of course, I still had problems tinkering with the new stories and poems I was inserting in these volumes. I even had to break out the OCR software to scan my first ever published story, “Jerry’s Last Fare”, which was published in the Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1989. No electronic version of that one, obviously. There were certainly a few lines in that chestnut I would change, but cripes, there comes a time when a guy has to abandon some things, right? I figure the reader will be forgiving.

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