If you started your visit to my site on my homepage, you’ll see I am author JD Stephens. I used to be author Joe Stephens, but I took a long break from writing for some pretty life-altering things, such as meeting and marrying the love of my life and adopting her beloved daughter, making her my beloved daughter too. I’m back to writing and am in the process of hitting the reset button in a lot of ways. One of them is revisiting my old works and completely re-imagining them. So, if you’ve read my old books, you’ll probably recognize the shadow of them in my new ones, but I hope you’ll agree, they’re new, much better works than anything I’ve ever done before.

Here’s the short version of how this happened. I had written a series of four books narrated by a character named Harry Shalan, whom I’d created–and then completely re-created, though that’s another story for a different post–way back in college. He was married to a woman named Dee. I had started in medias res, so to speak, in that the first book began after a serious crisis had taken place in Harry and Dee’s marriage, and a large part of the book was about them coming back together. As people read the series, one of the main pieces of feedback they gave me was they wanted to know more of the characters’ backstory, their origin, as individuals and as a couple. So, when I got to a point where there was some level of finality to the series, I decided to write a prequel that went all the way back to when Harry and Dee fell in love. Well, one prequel turned into two. Part of the challenge of writing prequels is getting the new story, which comes before the old story chronologically, to match up with what the reader already knows. So I had to re-read the original series. It was kind of like trying to build a bridge from both sides of the river at the same time, hoping to get the two sides to meet in the middle.

But as I read these old works, I started to get a sick feeling. They were, well, how do I say this gently? They were bad. In some cases terrible. I mean, there was some good stuff in them, but they weren’t nearly good enough to deserve publication. I understood completely why they got no traction with agents and publishing houses. Frankly, I was embarrassed I’d ever thought they were any good. They had some good, albeit often deeply flawed, stories, but I’d told them so poorly that I needed to go back, take them all the way down to the studs, shore up some really weak foundations, rearrange, demolish certain things, and add on a lot of others–enough to say they’re whole new constructions.

The first one is tantalizingly close to being ready to send off to agents and publishers. I am also working up the courage to share some excerpts from it in this blog. But I’m having a hard go of it because I used to be so completely confident in my writing and see now that I was so undeserving of that confidence that I’m having a hard time feeling any assuredness at all anymore. If I see now how bad those old books are, how do I know I won’t find my new writing is terrible in the future? I guess I have to come to peace with the possibility–maybe even probability–that I’ll always look ba ck on work I’ve done in the past and find it to be lacking in light of what I now know. But age, experience, and years of teaching creative writing classes have taught me that those old books were written by someone who didn’t really know how to write but thought he did. I still don’t know everything I should, but now I realize that, and that makes a huge difference.