When in the early 1970s Poul Anderson reissued The Broken Sword after it had been out of print for some years, he noted that, without changing the plot, he had cleaned up the writing. I didn't fully understand when I read his afterword: he'd published The Broken Sword, hadn't he? How could it need cleaning up?
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Werenight was written in bits and pieces from 1976 to 1978 (often in time stolen from my dissertation); it first appeared in 1979 broken into two parts, titled by the publisher Wereblood and Werenight. The same publisher also tagged me with the pseudonym Eric Iverson, on the assumption no one would believe Harry Turtledove, which is my real name.
And now it's time for the book to see print again. When I looked over the manuscript, I discovered, as Anderson and no doubt many others had before me, that I'm a better craftsman than I used to be. Without interfering with the story or characters I invented in my younger days, I have taken this chance to cut adjectives, adverbs, and semicolons, and generally tighten things up, and I've changed a couple of bit-players' names where I'd used others that struck me as too similar to them in later fiction. All in all, this is the book I would have written then if I'd been a better writer. I hope you enjoy it.
– Harry Turtledove, October 1992
Prince of The North