u/Civil_Ant_5755

On the new book: there's something to be said for an author being in creative flow. Pulling focus back to an older work especially one with legal and emotional baggage attached, could disrupt momentum on th, and the result might feel like an obligation rather than a passion project. That rarely produces the best work.
Creative momentum is one of the most fragile and least understood forces in a writer's life. It isn't simply enthusiasm. It's a kind of accumulated internal pressure, built over months or years, where everything the writer reads, observes, and feels is being unconsciously funnelled into the work in progress. The new book(Immortal Puppet Master) the author is writing exists inside that pressurised state. It is alive in a way that only current work can be. Returning to the banned book would mean puncturing that pressure and redirecting it backward and what gets lost in that redirection may never fully return.
There is also something worth examining about what "doing well" means for a writer in the middle of a project. It doesn't just mean sales figures or critical reception, it means the work is yielding, Ideas are arriving, The sentences are coming. That experience is rare enough that most serious writers will tell you it feels almost outside of their control, like catching something rather than making it. To voluntarily step away from that in order to wade back into legal disputes, old editorial decisions, and the emotional archaeology of a banned book, is to gamble with something genuinely precious and irreplaceable.
The legal and emotional baggage dimension deserves its own weight here. RI is not simply an unfinished creative task, it carries years of frustration, probably anger, possibly grief. Reconnecting with it means reconnecting with all of that. And those are not neutral emotional states to write from. They can produce powerful work, yes, but they can also produce reactive work, writing that is more concerned with settling scores or making a point, or adhering to rules and regulation, than with the integrity of the story itself. The author may find themselves not so much returning to the book as returning to the wound, which is a very different thing.
There is also the question of what obligation does to prose. When a writer is compelled by passion, by obsession, by the feeling that a story simply must be told the work tends to have a kind of necessity to it that readers can feel without being able to name. You know what mean just look at Perseverance chapter. When a writer is obligated by contract, by expectation, by the sense that they owe something to a readership or to their own past the work can become dutiful. Competent, perhaps. Careful, even. But missing whatever it is that makes a reader feel they are in the presence of something that could not have been otherwise. RI may have had that quality in its original form precisely because it was written under compulsion. Returning to it under obligation is almost the opposite condition.
And then there is the reader's side of this equation, which the author may not fully account for. The audience following the new book has formed an expectation, a relationship, an investment. Momentum in publishing is not only internal to the writer, it exists between writer and reader. Interrupting that to resurface an older work, however significant, risks breaking a thread of trust and attention that is very difficult to reweave once dropped. The readers of the Immortal Puppet Master may feel abandoned. The readers of RI book may feel that what they receive is a compromise. And the author may find themselves caught between two audiences, fully satisfying neither. The best creative work tends to come from a writer who has no choice but to write it not from one who has been handed back the rights to something they once were forced to let go.
On the author changing: There's a tension at the heart of this that rarely gets acknowledged: the author who wrote the book and the author who would republish it are not the same person. Time doesn't just add experience it rewrites the self. And a person who has watched their own work be banned, fought legal battles over it, lived with its absence, and built a separate creative identity in the meantime, has undergone a kind of transformation that is almost impossible to leave at the door when they return to an old manuscript
this one is perhaps the deepest concern. To make it worse a book that gets banned and stays banned for years becomes almost mythologised in the reader's mind. The version you love exists partly because it was frozen in time. If the author revisits it now shaped by different and new experiences as time continues forward, maybe he has changed in some unexpected way, maybe he became more cautious or more radical. He might not be able to resist the urge to revise, not just republish. And a "restored" edition that's actually a quiet rewrite could feel like a loss even if it's framed as a win.
The question isn't just whether they would change it. It's whether they even could resist the pull to do so. Old work has a way of feeling unfinished to its creator, the creator has since become someone who would have written it differently. What reads to you as a perfect, complete thing then might later read to them as a document of who they used to be with all the discomfort that entails. The temptation to quietly correct, to sand down an edge that now feels too sharp or sharpen one that now feels too dull, is almost gravitational. Perfect example would be LOTM and COI(spefically the ending - if you know, you know).
There's also the question of what the ban itself did to the author psychologically. Censorship is not a neutral event. It can harden a person into defiance, make them more committed to the original vision. But it can also exhaust them, make them want peace rather than confrontation, and that desire for resolution might unconsciously soften what was once raw or difficult. Alternatively, years of reflection on why the book was banned might lead them to certain conclusions perhaps agreeing with critics in some respects, or overcorrecting against them that might bleed into any revision.
Then there is the subtler issue of cultural and temporal context. The book was written at a specific moment, in response to specific conditions, in a specific emotional register. That moment is gone. If the author tries to update it for now consciously or not they risk making it speak to today's anxieties rather than the ones that gave it its original urgency. And a book that tries to be timely twice often ends up feeling timeless in neither moment.
What makes this especially hard for a devoted reader is that you can't unknow a revision. Once you've read the new version, the old one exists only in memory, and memory is imperfect. The mythology you built around the banned text. The gaps you filled in yourself, the meanings you constructed could be quietly displaced by the author's second thoughts, which may have far less claim on the truth of the book than your own long relationship with it.
The cruelest version of this outcome is one where nothing is dramatically changed, but the feeling is gone. Not because the words are different, but because you can sense, somewhere beneath the surface, that the hand that touched it again was older and less certain than the one that first wrote it.
On the "progress" caveat: do not read too much into it. Rights disputes, publishing negotiations, legal challenges around bans these can stall for years even after what looks like a breakthrough. Tempering expectation now protects you from a harder disappointment later.
Conclusion: To the author and everyone who has carried this book through the years it couldn't speak for itself. I have my concerns. About timing, about revision, about whether the version that returns will carry the same soul as the one that was taken away. Those concerns are real and I won't pretend otherwise. But underneath all of that is something simpler: I hope you get there. I hope the rights come back fully. I hope whatever you choose to do with the feels like freedom rather than obligation. And if the ending of this particular story doesn't go the way any of us hoped, well I still have 2334 chapters to heal with. The heart of what you built is already safe with me. My hopes and regards go with this, wherever it lands.

RI unban