Jonathan_S wrote:While this doesn't beg the question it certainly invites it -- what is the other Honorverse book you'd really like to re-edit?runsforcelery wrote:While I could wish for a critic with better spelling skills, WOH is one of the two books in the Honorverse I actually would like to re-edit. I wanted to edit it more tightly at the time, as a matter of fact, but the production crunch precluded it.
runsforcelery wrote:Shadow of Victory. I was . . . pretty sick when I was finishing that one up. If I hadn't been, I'm fairly sure I would have gone back in and rendered the names of the Polish and Czech police forces, security forces, seafood cooperatives, army, etc., in English after the first time or two each name appeared in the text. I'd've kept the Polish and the Czech in dialog and in the acronyms, but not breaking them into English in most places made it difficult for non-Polish and non-Czech readers to keep track of which was which and what planet I had them on this Tuesday.
There are a couple of other things I'd probably have tightened a little, but otherwise, I'd've left the book pretty much as it was because it did things for the story telling that I thought (and still think) needed to be done. But I do with I'd been feeling enough like myself to have recognized that while I had no trouble keeping things straight as the writer, readers could have used a little more assistance.
I have waxed eloquent - and sometimes not so - while sharing my parents irritating insistence that their offspring engage in incessant travel about the globe to acquire "an education not found in textbooks."
As a young kid I hated leaving toys, friends, then later - girlfriends, during a time I was too young and naive to appreciate the wisdom of parents. When I entered into college, my parents wisdom began to show itself in a huge way. Many of my professors were foreign and their accent was quite difficult for many Americans to understand, which sadly led to many of them dropping courses. Being well traveled, I have no trouble understanding the apparently difficult accent of foreigners.
Having nothing else to attribute it to, I imagine it is also the reason I had no trouble at all with Shadow of Victory. For me personally, the many foreign names simply lent a certain credence that accompanies a richly authentic feel. I enjoyed it immensely and wouldn't have Weber change a thing. If he did, I'd favor the original non-redacted, King James version which would surely become a collector's item.
