For years readers have been asking me for Michael O'Toole's book, the sequel to
The Marquess (e-book pictured here at
Regency Reads) Since I'm in the process of working through boxes of old files to recycle, I hunted down the dead tree manuscript of
The English Heiress, the title I sold the book under. I don't think this is the original version I sold, but it roughly matches the ancient Word documents I'd saved to disk. I have utterly no idea what version of Word (or perhaps Leading Edge) I used for saving this file, but it's pretty much a mess. Files are corrupted. Chapters are mislabeled. And worse yet, the only formatting left doesn't work on any version of Word that I possess. Which means I don't even have paragraphs!
So on this gloomy day, I'm sitting here with essentially hundreds of pages of unformatted text and a neat manuscript, trying to match one against the other. And once everything is put right--whenever that might be--I still have to go through and edit to something close to my current standards. I can't change the story, mind you. It is what it is. But I can reduce some of the endless roundaboutation that Regency historicals previously used, apparently in imitation of Heyer and Austen.
And ever after all that, I still love Michael!
