There's an old saw that "Time flies when you're having fun." Truth is, time flies whether you're having fun or miserable as hell. It's simple physics. Fortunately, I haven't been miserable as hell. But it hasn't been all roses either. I've been absent from these pages for a month because I've been up to my eyeballs trying to finish a major rewriting of Sleeping Dogs: The Awakening.
Why the rewrite? I've asked myself that question a time or two over the past several weeks. The answer is based on my perception that there are two basic ways to create a successful career as a fiction writer. One is to edit-polish, edit-polish ad nauseam until you have an extremely well-written novel, a masterpiece of modern prose. The other is to produce a prodigious volume of work—dozens of novels. The problem with the first method is that you probably will go to your grave with a single book to your name. And, most likely, you'll never reach the point where you truly are satisfied that it's "perfect". The danger in adhering to the second method is that you may produce a bunch of pulp that really isn't very good, with no real reason for anyone to read any of them.
I'm a slow learner sometimes, and it took me a while to recall something I read years ago in Robert Pursig's masterpiece, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Essentially, we occidentals exist in an environment founded on dualism (on/off, right/wrong, left/right, good/bad, etc.). But the reality is that there usually are more choices than simply selecting which horn we'll let the bull gore us with—the right or left one.
So, it eventually dawned on me that there was at least a third path to pursue as a writer of fiction, and it incorporates elements of the first two. I now believe success as a writer requires a volume of work product. But that it should be predicated on a very solid, well-written first book. The key is to recognize when that book has reached a point where it tells a compelling story, polished and tightly written, where the continued polishing enters the realm of diminishing returns. In other words, you must realize the child has reached the age of consent, and send it out into the world while you focus on the youngsters coming up behind it.