The Times New Roman is a changing

I’ve got a couple of new stories coming out shortly: The Brasher Bat in Tales 0f the Shadowmen 19 – Demi Monde in December and The Portrait of Damian Black in Bewildering Tales 975 (http://www.bewilderingstories.com/). I’ve been proof editing the latter this morning.

Proofing something you wrote a while ago is an interesting experience. Firstly, you notice things you didn’t when you did the first edit because it no longer seems like your story. It was one of the two dozen stories I wrote weekly during lockdown and as a deliberate policy I didn’t do anything on the first edit except sort out typos and obvious grammatical mistakes. Plus change the font and spacing etc when I submitted it to comply with Shunn guidelines. I did a couple of changes at the request of the magazine to make some things clearer, but it’s otherwise an example of my writing style at the time.

It could be argued that I don’t have a single writing style – especially in the lockdown stories where many were prompted by suggestions of genre, location and main character name from friends and the public. I tried to fit the style to the story. However, re-reading it made it clear my style has changed. My writing has got tighter, with less complex sentences. I was tempted to split many of them up in Damian Black, but resisted in order to leave it the way I had originally written. That was what had been accepted.