I believe I share a common dream with many other writers on this young planet.
Do we write for our own satisfaction? Yes, we do. Do we write to release our imagination? Yes again. Do we write to create our own world and maybe escape from the real one, if only for a while? Yes, once more. Each writer will have a reason or two that is more important than the rest.
However, there is one dream that is shared by us all: we write stories for others to enjoy. And we hope they are moved enough to lay out their hard-earned money for more.
After all, art is the purest form of communication. You can’t beat a good book, song, picture, or film and the many other things artists create for our enjoyment. An artist adds beauty to the life we live in. Let’s face it, without their creations, the world would be a dull and less interesting place.
When you love a piece of art, it means in some way that creation has communicated or touched something special in you. It’s a funny one, as in most things, but especially in art, a person might love it, another might find it boring, yet another might hate it.
One could say that art stirs the mind, fills the heart and lifts the soul.
A writer attempts to achieve all three in whatever genre they have gravitated to. The lucky and skilled few have much success. Unfortunately, there’s room only for a few at the top of that large pyramid built from the desires and sweaty brows of the many.
Game Hunter – The Original
That brings me to why I have spent a fair chunk of my rather busy life completely re-writing the Game Hunter series.
After some time passed from the initial publication, I had been fortunate enough to gain a fuller experience in the art of story-telling. Therefore, I decided to look over the Game Hunter series with a more practiced eye. This turned out to be an interesting exercise, for reasons I’m now going to share with you.
The original goal was made up of six different targets:
A) to write a fast-paced, all-action, in your face belter of a story.
B) To have everything set in an interesting city.
C) To have a different take on the bad guys and good guys.
I believe I achieved all three. So far so good.
D) I wanted to embellish the story with some humour and a touch of romance.
That also I believed I achieved.
E) Then there were the interesting characters – both good and bad.
I wasn’t sure I gave them my best. However, I received good feedback from my readers, so who was I to complain?
F) Finally, there had to be tension, purpose and a fulfilling ending.
Well, I’d say yes, yes and yes again to that – I thought.
I was satisfied and the books sold reasonably well with pleasing reviews.
Game Hunter – The Re-Write
So, what could be the problem?
First of all, how many of you have gone back to something you wrote or built or did, quite sometime after only to decide, with the eyes of hindsight, that you could have done a better job of it? In fact, that happens to many people after a good amount of time, or a short amount of time or hardly any time at all has passed.
Take us writers, quite often, no matter how good we find the written sentence, paragraph or chapter; the next time through we can find ourselves wondering how we wrote such tosh. Or, more often, shake our heads in wonder at an obvious mistake.
There lays the lesson.
Yes, I managed to achieve what I set out to do. However, on review with a sharper eye, I felt the interesting characters, the historic locations, the budding romance; the terrible heartbreaks and the joyful moments deserved to run deeper with more weight and colour and heart. Eventually, I came to the unwanted conclusion that the whole story needed to be given more life.
It was only my opinion, but it left me with an unshakable feeling of unfinished business.
Now, at last, I come to the main deciding factor that sent me over the edge. I didn’t put enough of my heart, blood, sweat and tears into the main characters. Once I realised that, there was no turning back from a-mother-of-all-rewrites.
So, I did it and I’m certainly glad I did. Thank you, my dear readers, for your heartwarming reviews. I invite you to read the series again and like me get to know better those characters’ struggles, heartbreaks, deaths and joyful successes, as they work to overcome the deadly adventures within the prison City of London.
After all, this time the zombies are the heroes and they have a hard enough time of it as it is without me not doing the best I can to tell you about it.
Mark Kloss
London
April 2020