The second edition of my second novel finally arrived yesterday - with a new, vastly more appropriate cover.

The first edition had languished after my initial push in 2003 - I just didn't believe in the book at that point. Eventually, I'd seen the original text as a mess. I'd had it picked up, first by one indie publisher, then another, only to find these companies gone belly-up months later, prior to publishing (Was I a literary Typhoid Mary?). Each publisher had different editorial preferences, all of which I adopted. Finally, frustrated, I self-published it, as it was. Later, I realized the text, while improved in certain ways by these three iterations of editorial comments, had grown hopelessly disjointed.

So last year I re-edited it, and it now reads as I'd hoped it would have back in the day.

But will it survive its tainted past and the vagaries of today's book world? We'll see.