Separated Out was first released over 10 years ago. When it came to Redux, a number of factors conspired to make this more than a simple update. First, I knew it could be much better – it was my first book and I felt the text was clunky in places. Second, while the style worked well for print, in these times it needed to also work as an ebook so a number of box-outs, sidebars and footnotes needed to be integrated into the text. And third new interviewees came to light, and their stories needed to be told.

But most importantly this past decade has been very important in Marillion’s history. At the turn of the millennium Marillion looked like they might be on the cusp of new success which, to their credit, has been achieved. In book terms this meant unpicking some of the previous narrative and weaving it into what we now know to be true.

Overall, the original book has had several editorial and honing passes to bring it up to date. A final challenge was that the original book was about 145,000 words – the new chapters initially took this up to 180,000 words, but the target was to keep the total word count below 150,000 so this meant more simplification, distillation, reduction. The overall effect, I hope, has been to create a far better, more readable book.

Best, Jon

Jason/Jester on MOLF