Not All There was originally published back in 2017, six years on from then I have matured as a writer and a person. I wanted to re-write Claude’s story with distance and the experience that 7 years of craft gives you. I didn’t have that when I first published. This edition is better written, better edited, and also has a new middle and end. I hesitate to say it’s a new novella all together because it holds on to the key themes and characters. However, the earlier edition of Not All There, does not pack half the punch as today’s version.
Why am I only hearing about Not All There now?
This is a tale that may be very familiar to some indie or self-pub authors. I first wrote Not All There at the end of my Creative Writing Undergraduate Degree. I was proud of it but I didn’t know what to do with such a thing, and I was a very immature writer and naive as a person back in 2016/17. This time also coincide with the golden age of self-publishing, there was a lot of speculation, and some of this was fuelled by podcasts, forums and facebook groups. A few of my fellow alumni were going to take the self-pub route and told me it was a simple as ‘throwing the book up on Amazon’ and I did precisely that.
As though it was a meal that had been eaten and it was necessary to vomit it out into the world,
I took no further steps, to clean up the mess I had made.
I didn’t have a fancy website like this one.
I never thought of myself as a published author.
The first edition of Not All There had been unpublished for several years before I decided that I was too unhappy just to let it sit.
My first course of action was to contact Amazon and ask for it to be taken down completely, but unfortunately there is no recourse for that. So I decided that if I could not undo what was done, then I should improve it. I think this is a rather good lesson to learn, even if it was a rather difficult one for me to sit through, however we all have to learn at some point that everything on the internet is forever.
Confronting an issue that you have been avoiding for many years is very difficult, however, I must say that I am really pleased that Not All There is now in its second edition. It is an even better novella than I could have imagined it being from that first draft of a first edition I wrote. If you read or bought the first edition, and are curious how the second edition stands up I would encourage you to read it. If you still doubt me, send me a message via the contact page and I will let you return one of the old copies and send you a new copy out at no extra charge.