The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt

Added on 06 February 2009

The Final Cut is done for the moment, and safely in the hands of that editorial velociraptor, TPCKAM. Have moved on to editing The Cutting Edge of Barney Thomson, with the intention of re-releasing it at some point this year as The Barber Surgeon's Hairshirt, to tie in with the already re-released first book in the series.

This re-release of Number 2 should definitely happen; whether I manage to get around to re-launching the entire series is still up in the air. That global downturn that everyone keeps talking about may yet stretch its fetid fingers of despair into the small publishing enterprise that is the Barney Thomson series.

I wrote The Cutting Edge of Barney Thomson in 1998 on a PC that I have long since binned. I never kept a copy of the book on disk as I had no reason to believe that I'd ever need it. And I'm not the greatest for backing up. So now that it comes to re-writing the book - and again, as with the rewrite of the first one, I'm changing the tense of the book from present to past - I've nothing to work with.

For The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson I just sat with the book open in front of me and re-wrote it. That was nuts, but I kind of enjoyed it. Numbers 2 and 3 are a lot longer however. So I contacted the printer to see what they could do for me. Naturally they charged money to send my own file back to me, with not much assurance that I'd actually be able to use it. Anyway, I now have a file with the manuscript on it, along with tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of coding. So, this is what I'm currently working on. Going through a file of The Cutting Edge of Barney Thomson, taking out the code, changing the tense of the prose, and removing the Scottish dialect.

Mind numbing, yet oddly satisfying. I wonder if other authors ever do this kind of thing. I wonder if JK wants to go back to the early Harry Potter books and make them three hundred pages longer.

In other news here's a short extract from a review of Lost in Juarez from the book review site, Booklore:

This is Douglas Lindsay’s first novel not featuring Barney and if the author is trying to divest himself of the label ‘Barney Thomson Author’ he has done so with great style. The book is very well written with a topical and at times scary plot while still laced with the authors’ trademark dark humour. I’m ashamed to say it, being such a Barney Fan, but it could even be the best thing he has written to date.