Revising Harriet Walters
After having carefully considered the reader reviews I received from my LibraryThing Members' Giveaway of The Affairs of Harriet Walters, Spinster, I am working on revising and re-e-publishing the book. I confess to having made a mistake in publishing it before it was as polished as it should have been, but I felt the pressure to get it out there in time for the big Christmas push. There are some typos and grammatical mistakes in it, and I want it to be the best that I can make it. Fortunately, e-publishing is rather like taking a play on the road before it runs on Broadway - the playwright gets a chance to rewrite before it hits the big time. And, at $.99, the reader has still had a pretty darned good read.
Because I'm proud of the story. As I've said before, I wrote Good Intentions and Harriet Walters because I love the Regency period. The world was more relaxed and more courteous in those days. People traveled by two or four feet - the railways didn't exist back then - communicated by post, and courted each other. A frequent criticism I've seen was that the book was slow-starting, but once the reader got into it, s/he cared about the characters and wanted to see what happened next. Not a lot happens in the beginning, someone complained. But, consider the actual novels of that period and the lives of the women I'm writing about. Stories revolved around whether or not the hero danced with the heroine at the ball, the immorality of performing a play in one's own household, or making a quip about a too-talkative neighbour, to her detriment. Not thrilling by today's action-packed standards, perhaps, but it's all about the characters and the little things that happen in their lives.
So, pour yourself a cup of tea or chocolate, sit back in your chair, and enjoy an old-fashioned romance.
Because I'm proud of the story. As I've said before, I wrote Good Intentions and Harriet Walters because I love the Regency period. The world was more relaxed and more courteous in those days. People traveled by two or four feet - the railways didn't exist back then - communicated by post, and courted each other. A frequent criticism I've seen was that the book was slow-starting, but once the reader got into it, s/he cared about the characters and wanted to see what happened next. Not a lot happens in the beginning, someone complained. But, consider the actual novels of that period and the lives of the women I'm writing about. Stories revolved around whether or not the hero danced with the heroine at the ball, the immorality of performing a play in one's own household, or making a quip about a too-talkative neighbour, to her detriment. Not thrilling by today's action-packed standards, perhaps, but it's all about the characters and the little things that happen in their lives.
So, pour yourself a cup of tea or chocolate, sit back in your chair, and enjoy an old-fashioned romance.
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