sword_logic | fic talk: edit slog

currently on a two-week "vacation" in poland (i.e., some family stuff) so i'm using this time to get some more work done on rewriting S11 au part I, and boy, is it a lot of work.

the most difficult thing about this is that my writing style - in terms of section breaks and transitions - is very different now than what it was back when i was writing this part. filling in and changing those transitions has been really challenging. i'm glad that i'm doing it, though, because stylistically this whole part feels SO fucking jarring. like, wow.

i've gotten up to where wash and maine get to the town that dealt with the kidnapped kids, and i'm. just. i could have done such a better job worldbuilding here!!!! and so i'm going to fucking do it now. watch me. for this section i definitely want to do a better job of introducing the feds vs. rebels conflict and highlighting the way it's affected life on chorus; the basic concept of the whole kidnapping section is... okay, i guess? but i think i can execute it a bit better now.

another thing i've been steadfastly changing is the amount of people explicitly killed. i know this is halo, i know this is video games, but again: there's a jarring difference between how i wrote combat in parts II and III, and how i wrote combat in part I. wash kills SO many fucking people. it feels unnecessary and, at times, downright out of character. PFL and the recovery force aside, if we're looking at halo canon, i would be comfortable wagering that most UNSC personnel on the front lines had either never in their lives committed acts of war against other human beings. the youngest person who would have been deployed to fight innies would be about 50 years old by the time S11 au takes place. and like, i know the PFL timeline is kinda fucky, but i've chosen my ages for wash and maine and i stick by them - so wash would have never raised a weapon against another human being with intent to kill before his time in the recovery force, likely (though ymmv as to what came pre-PFL, of course; ONI is ONI). it just doesn't feel quite right to have such a ridiculous body count at the start of this fic.

i think i've mentioned this before in another post, but a lot of the way i portrayed mental health stuff is also something i just do not connect with anymore; changing that has also been a challenge, because some of it is baked into the motion of the plot. i struggled with it during the previous edits to this section, and i'm definitely still struggling with it now, lol.

i'm also foreseeing a struggle with the sparring segment, and everything that takes place at that base. i can't put my finger on just what it is that bothers me about that section, even after all this time, but man. i guess i'll just have to figure something out once i get there.

in any case! progress. i'm on page 48 out of 118 according to google docs, which is dece progress for about 2 or 3 days of work. i reread the beginning part that i'd worked on previously, and i really like it. i hope i can keep that up for the rest of this.