fic talk: done? ??

[sword_logic]

i'm... done??? i'm done with part iii of S11 au. wow. i'm done with the thing.

this is in need of severe edits and is metaphorically being held together with spit and prayers, but it's DONE. turns out all i needed was a solid shove and to stop being scared of finishing this.

wow. boy. time to put this away for a bit and then start patching up the extensive holes in this thing. current count is 95,312 words, and i have plenty of things that need expanding on.

the majority of what i did to finish this was make a skeleton for my already-written stuff to fit into, and a good chunk of rewriting as i went. my writing (both skill and style) has changed a lot since i first started this fic, and it's also changed a lot since i wrote a lot of the things i'd been saving in my doc full of fragments. rewriting and editing as i went was a surprising amount of work; there was a lot of tone change i needed to do, which kinda surprised me. turns out S11 au is a lot more serious now than it was originally. my grasp on pacing has also changed dramatically, and once this is done and published i'm going to sit down and seriously consider heavily editing part i. during a somewhat recent re-read, i was honestly gobsmacked by how much i disliked it and how much it clashed for me. we'll see.

i have a loooot of work ahead of me, seeing as the skeleton i made was thoroughly incomplete and there are SO many gaps i need to fill. having the whole thing done is a huge weight off of my shoulders, though, and it feels good. super good. doesn't quite feel real yet, but everything else feels more achievable now. this part is pretty damn solid up to one particular point, where i did a smash-cut out of desperation, wrote another very solid chunk, and then basically..... hopscotched my way to the end. but! i can do it. the whole thing just needs some time to rest and then i can dig back in.

edit 2: i was so scrambled last night, i forgot to get all my thoughts out. (shrug emoji) anyways, i have 2,753 words left in my fragments doc, and i was kinda surprised at how strongly i felt last night that i DO NOT want to use those bits. it's mostly a smattering of interludes and connections, but when i was finishing things up last night (...wow, what a concept.) i just got, like, incredibly furious at how... idk, wasteful? pointless? a lot of it was. i found a really satisfying way to wrap up (for me, at least) and i think it Works better than the lengthier wrap-up i'd originally intended. i can't really say anything specific without giving away the whole ending, but the ~denoument~ section was supposed to be SO much longer than it is now and that felt so pointless. i can wrap up X without doing Y.

in any case! i'm doing my best to resist the urge to look at the doc. this bad boy needs to just sit and stew for a bit, though in the spirit of getting work done, i'll probably get some handwritten notes down today.