Recent Revisions to My Novels

Hello family, friends, and readers. This isn’t really a blog post, but it does contain important information. I thought I’d share with you news regarding recent revisions to my novels. Now, these aren’t significant enough to constitute a second edition (as far as I’m concerned), but nevertheless I thought I’d let you all know what’s changed.

Book Updates:

The Shadow Over Lone Oak is now divided into 18 chapters rather than 17. This is because the penultimate chapter, after much contemplation, ran a little too long for my tastes. It has now been cut into two chapters at a point that was previously a scene break. The first is now entitled “A Heart of Darkness” and the second will remain under its original headline.
Both The Shadow Over Lone Oak and The Smiling Man Conspiracy contained a prologue and an epilogue. These chapters have now been renamed. For TSOL, these chapters are now called “Benefactor” and “The Box” respectively. For TSMC, the prologue and epilogue have been redubbed “A History of Evil” and “New Life” to better reflect their content. Why have I made this change? It’s my intention to maintain all manner of consistency between my books. As such, any forthcoming novels in the series will not have a prologue or epilogue as chapter titles.
Upon revisiting my work, I’ve found (thanks to the Holy Spirit’s conviction) places where I could eliminate profanity without losing the reality of the horror in these books. Because of this, there is significantly less swearing in both novels, though they are far from appropriate for children.
There is minor line editing based on reader feedback and additional proofreading. The most significant alteration is in “The Box” in order to make a particular character’s motives more clearly aligned with their agenda in the sequel. The language previously used portrayed a bit more ambiguity than I intended. Yes, there is such a thing as too much obfuscation/confusion in a mystery/thriller book.
Not a content revision, but still important: The Shadow Over Lone Oak is approaching its one-year anniversary. Because it has been out for a while, I’ve decided to make the Kindle Edition $2.99 again rather than $3.99!
Also not a content revision: the cover for The Smiling Man Conspiracy now has a matte finish like its predecessor.

These changes, while necessary to make from my perspective, do not necessitate a second purchase (unless you so feel inclined). I deemed it best to tell you these things so that you wouldn’t feel as if you’d been cheated with an “outdated” copy. The plot and characters have not changed and 99% of the sentences are almost exactly the same.

Will there be further alterations? I hope not. Unless a significant new error has been introduced, these current versions should be the final iterations of both novels. I don’t intend to make it a habit to constantly update my novels.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions about this particular post or my work as a whole, feel free to ask me via email, Facebook, twitter, etc. and I will do my best to answer them. God bless, have a good night, and I’ll be back with more writing, more evangelism, and more corny humor soon.

*One last note: for some reason, the “Look Inside” feature on the digital versions does not reflect the updated content. The paperback editions do, however, so I presume this is merely an Amazon.com error.