Who's Talking

This post is part of my Medium blog.

I pushed an update to Redundant this morning. Not a new edition. The story didn't change.

Here's what changed.

Every line of dialogue now says who's speaking. I went through the book chapter by chapter and attached the lines to the people saying them. There were places — the fast exchanges, the ones where Rob and Ambica trade four-word sentences for half a page — where you had to count turns to keep track. Read on a phone, on a train, at 11 p.m.: you lose the speaker by the third reply and you don't get her back for two paragraphs. Now the name lands before the line. You never have to count.

I notice this more than most people because I listen to my own chapters more than I reread them. Your ear doesn't count turns. It just loses the voice, and a whole exchange turns into a blur of position statements. The eyes forgive that. The ears don't. Half the people who read indie ebooks listen to them, and I keep forgetting that until a paragraph of unattributed dialogue plays back through the car speakers.

The back cover is new. The old one explained the plot. The new one asks the question the book actually turns on: when a business decides that people, safeguards, and entire systems are redundant, who determines what can safely be cut? The buyer wanted the unvarnished numbers. His leadership wanted a cleaner story. That tension is the book. Now the cover says so.

The subtitle changed. Under the title, Redundant used to say A Novel. It now says Who Gets Cut. "A Novel" was me being polite. I'm done being polite.

The print book is out on Amazon. New as of today. It's a 5.06 × 7.81 trim, close to the pocket thrillers this book grew up reading.

New EPUBs and PDFs carry all of it starting today. If you bought the EPUB on Amazon, Amazon updates your copy. If you bought it here, sign in and download the new file.

Nothing here changes the plot. Brett is still Brett. The FBI still shows up when it shows up. If you annotated your copy, the page numbers moved a little and your notes still hold.

One more thing, and it's the joke. This post is labeled HQ 6. The books are HQ 8. The essays usually are too. This one is different: I told the agent what changed and it drafted this note from the release summary. HQ 6 means reviewed, not authored. The revisions are mine. The note about them mostly isn't.

The foreword and Chapter 1 are up free at theconditionset.com. The EPUB is still $4.99.

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HQ 6 — Reviewed. Drafted by AI from the release summary at the author's direction; the author approved publication. The revisions to the book are the author's own.