Thursday, August 28, 2008

Free Revised Version of Primary Inversion

I signed up for a Catherine Asaro mailing list a while ago when I was desperately trying to find a copy of The Radiant Seas. Yesterday Catherine sent an email to the group to let us know that a revised version of her first novel Primary Inversion is now available at the Baen Free Library. Here is what she had to say about the new revisions:
This is a rewritten version of my first published book. I'm a better writer now, so I went through the entire book earlier this year, polished, streamlined, and updated it. If you're in the music business, you could say I remastered it ;-)
I am curious about the changes since I thought this was already a pretty good book. Primary Inversion was one of those books I couldn't put down and read in about 2 days (review). Actually, it was the book that convinced me I might like space opera after all.

There are many other titles also available for free at the Baen Free Library.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's great news! Maybe eventually she's even decide to publish the revised version. I can't wait to read it; I wonder if I'll be able to spot the change right off. ~totally excited~

Kristen said...

Asaro mentioned she's been updating her facebook page with news like this so maybe there is more information about the possibility of publication over there. She didn't mention anything about that in the email she sent, though. They do have a new cover for it that she said she was quite happy with (it's shown on the site after you go to the ebook).

Anonymous said...

I saw, it's now the saga of "The Rubdy Dynasty" instead of "The Skolian Empire." That was interesting.

I did a line-by-line comparison of the two versions (using Amazon's "Surprise me!" samples) for several random pages. Looks like most of the only changes she made were what my editor taught me back in my writing job: if you can replace three words with one, do it. So instead she changed phrases like "I became more focused" to "I focused," and "Ships were trying to flee" to "Ships were fleeing." A lot of that "becoming," "trying," "that had been," and their ilk eliminated in favor of tighter, cleaner writing.

She also re-wrote instances of Soz interrupting and correcting herself, like "I didn't like him. No, I suppose that's not really true. I did like him, only..." That's another change for the better.

I'm tempted to go through the entire book to see whether there are any more substantial changes, and whether the overall effect is altered in a subtle way. But I hope I'll won't get quite that bored anytime soon.

Kristen said...

I was wondering about the change from "The Skolian Empire" to "The Ruby Dynasty" as well.

If you find any more major changes, let me know! I haven't gone through it myself yet other than looking at a little bit of the beginning and a little bit of the end.