My collection of stories The Spare Midge has been revised a couple of times since its initial creation in 2007. I've dropped and added stories and changed their order. I've changed the title itself. Each story has also been polished a bit, to remove some or another infelicity.

One consistency, however, has been the tone.

It's not a happy collection. This is because the author was not a happy person. I, that author, am not necessarily a happier person today; but the strand of fatalism in The Spare Midge somewhat bothers me. The things I am writing now, especially since The Giant's Walk, are just tonally different. Tonally better, maybe. Yet my old stories are still good. I wouldn't be presenting them otherwise.

It has crossed my mind, over this past decade, to maybe brighten the collection a little. Inserting The Endless Batteries was one brightening move. Yet even that tale has a bittersweet ending! And really, there's no way to brighten something like Tainted by Grace without nullifying the story altogether.

One story, though, that seemed susceptible to brightening was the eponymous The Spare Midge. I actually didn't have to change much. I didn't want to change the tragic outcome, but I did want to change the narrator's reaction to it. I also wanted to remove one crude aspect.

The crude aspect was trivial. The narrator referred to sex as a "wet." My intention was to be crude, to be reductive, and to suggest a cyberpunkish alteration of sex into something called a "wet." But the current me dislikes the crudity. As an author I have not forsaken crudity. But this one thing... ach, it's gone, and good riddance.

The narrator's reaction is a deeper issue and more directly a matter of the story's original fatalism. I realized that I could make The Spare Midge a hopeful story by changing and adding only a few sentences and words. I didn't have to rewrite substantially. The story comes to a very clear fork; and instead of going left I now go right.

No, I haven't given the story a happy ending. But the utter fatalism is gone.

Then the question becomes: Am I betraying the story?

If I had made this change when I was originally writing the story, it would simply have counted as editing. An author regularly decides that a character should do A instead of B — even though B was in the original drafts.

But if the change is made fifteen years later? After the story has already been presented to the public?

Well, first, I don't imagine more than a handful of people, perhaps no more than two, have ever read the entire prior version. In some sense I am still in the editing phase.

And second, much as the original fatalism bothers me, my reaction to it now isn't merely a kind of bowdlerization, as is certainly the business with "wet." I truly want the story to be better. I'm not making Han shoot second because, somehow, I've grown fond of the character and think it icky that he might have shot first. Nor have I undone my narrator by making her do something she wouldn't have. Rather I have placed her on a hopeful path. It is the ending I changed, not the beginning or the climax; and indeed, the new ending plays off an earlier moment of hope that was always one of the strongest moments in the story. That moment is no longer in vain.

I have not betrayed the story. I have saved it from itself.

I'm not going to be specific about what has been changed. I've probably called too much attention to it already. I suppose when I die the legions of literary scholars, intent on the intentions of the great David Skinner, will unearth the earlier drafts and identify my changes. Know ye, scholars, that I disavow the earlier drafts! I am happy with The Spare Midge as it now stands.

P.S. But see here.