I've done it. I've finished the full re-edit of Book 1. I'm reposting all the chapters in one go, so hopefully nothing gets borked. For those who have read the story, nothing essentially changes, except the writing style. The original version was very dialogue-driven, which some people found hard to read, and also wreaked havoc when I tried to get a dead-tree version of the book printed. I've re-written it to be much more narrative, but it doesn't change the plot or the characters, the overall tone stays the same, and it generally reads much better IMHO.
Book 1 review took longer than expected. Blame work.
I am actively working on book 2 again and new chapters will start appearing shortly.
On the plus side, good things are happening for book 3 :)
I really want to finish cleaning up Book 2 and post it. The first pass, full-text story is complete. However, I've had to set it aside for the moment.
I've pretty much rewritten large swaths of Book 1. It preserves faithfully the plot and emotional tone, but the flow is much improved. The reason I'm focusing my creative time and energy on this is for selfish reasons: my wife has offered to get me a dead-tree edition printed and bound as my birthday present, so that takes priority.
I'm doing the final proofread now and once that's done, I can go back to Book 2.
I appreciate your patience in this, and once I'm done with putting Book 1 to bed, I will focus on Book 2 and it will get the last 30-odd chapters posted in one go, so hopefully the wait will have been worth it.
I can also mention that the Book 3 story bible is fleshing out quite nicely and I'm already putting things in reserve for Book 4, though that's still very much in the idea and concept phase (remember, I am a project manager / software engineer)