fic talk: edits (but not on part iii)

[sword_logic]

my brain wants to pick at things, so i'm trying to trick myself into feeling like i'm editing S11 au by editing S11 au. just not the most recent part.

i cloned my doc ages ago and started on some halfhearted edits of part i around the time i finished writing part ii, and i'm back at it now with extremely renewed vigor. i'm going through it as ruthlessly as i can, since, well, it's a copy of the doc, and part i is living on AO3 anyways.

this is both a lot more fun and a lot less painful than i thought it would be. there are a few things i'm not looking forward to tackling, but the more i think about it, the more i feel they really, really need to be changed. hell, depending on how fast this goes and whether or not end up liking it, i might actually update part i before publishing part iii just to have a cohesive finished Thing all in one go. i'm about 10 pages in (of... wow, 121 lol) in about 30min of editing, so we'll see how long this takes me.

i did not expect to slam through 40k words/121 pages of edits in about 24 hours' time but... i did? immediate impressions: started with 40,436 words and ended with 40,037, which was absolutely shocking to me. i feel like i deleted so much more than i embellished or patched up. but hey, considering i deleted things that felt really senseless to the flow of the fic, i'll take it. this was a lot of work, and i'm genuinely surprised that i finished this quickly while editing so thoroughly. i found myself making fewer edits the longer i went through the doc, which, i guess, that tracks. when i last read through part i (i.e., when i felt really prompted to edit part i) i felt loads better about the second half than the first.

i'm starting a second pass right now, and i'm surprised again at the fact that i still have edits i want to make. i fixed so much of the tone that was giving me such a huge issue, but i keep finding little things to add or fix up. will likely report back again later.

and like, damn, i might update part i this coming weekend. i might actually do that.