Sometimes, you rewrite a book to understand yourself better.

Writing has always been my way of understanding things.

If you’ve followed me at all, you know I always like to say “All of it is fiction, and all of it is true.”

I am not my characters, but my characters are all me. Bits and pieces of me, anyway. The heroes, the heroines, the villains, the secondary characters who end up getting their own stories…all fiction. All true.

I revised Vanilla because I could, but more than that, because I wanted to. I wanted to get closer to the story I’d set out to tell way back when. I think I got there. Even better than that, I started percolating a new book for these characters. No plot yet (sigh, alas, I am not a plotter.) No plans. But an idea.

Pretty freaking excited about that!

Did I get it right this time?

Okay, it’s not exactly the book I wanted to write the first time. But it’s the book I 𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘥 to write the first time.

There are some books that end up being exactly what I wanted or needed them to be. Dirty was one. Tempted, definitely. Tear You Apart, for sure.

Vanilla was always a book that I’d started with one idea and ended up with another. This revised version cleans that up. So no, it’s not the book I wanted to write the first time. It is the book I wanted it to be.

I wanted the MMC to be a sub. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to explore how easy it is for some people to embrace all the parts of themselves, and how hard it is for some people to admit they have those parts at all. The first version of Vanilla explored that, but the revised version, in my opinion, does a much better job. We don’t all start off knowing and loving ourselves exactly as we are. Why should characters in a book have it easier?

It wouldn’t be a Megan Hart book if everyone made good choices, would it?

I’m happy with the revised version of Vanilla, and so excited to share it with the world!

If you read Vanilla in the past and you loved it, I hope you give this new version a try. If you read it and you hated it, well, please tell everyone you despise that they need to read this fantastic new book you just heard about. You know, really ruin their life.

And to everyone who’s been there along with me for all these years, thank you. I’d write books even if nobody read them, but it’s a whole lot nicer when you do.