sword_logic | fic talk: no quarter

wow, it's been a while. to get right into it, this post was sparked specifically because earlier today i drove a nice big loop around the area — incidentally, it was the same drive i referenced at the end of this post. truly mindblowing how life changes.

in any case, hi, i'm writing rvb longfic again (hi writing rvb longfic again), i have navel-gazey thoughts on writing itself.

it was interesting to go back and read the aforementioned post again because - what a daisy-chain of links here - i was also recently thinking about how i really should have just reworked P vs NP start to finish instead of the weird ship of theseus fic it became. i'm not disappointed with P vs NP, per se, but it's really interesting to reflect back and realize that even since 2019 i've grown as a writer (to say nothing of 2014), and i've also specifically gotten better at writing longer, plottier fic. no quarter is in need of heavy edits right now; currently the document clocks in at 44,078 words and doc where i keep my cut fragments is at 8,722 words. that's not an insignificant amount, lmao. it feels really good to be able to recognize when things need to be cut or changed radically; one of those cut fragments is actually a whole section that's nearly 3k words. i chopped it because it wasn't working, and then added a not-insignificant chunk of it back in. (it's the latter half of chapter 2, actually.)

it's also been interesting (and insightful, i guess) to set out to write this fic as a multi-chapter fic, which is to say, with regular chapter breaks planned from the outset. i think part of why P vs NP comes off as rambly to me when i'm not feeling charitable towards it is that i had this, like, weird idea that breaking it into smaller chapters would be Bad Writing, somehow. i genuinely have no idea how i got that sense or where from. by contrast, quema feels to me like the fic where chapters and chapter breaks really clicked for me. not that i hadn't written multichap fic before, but quema was where it felt really good. there aren't any unnecessary transition paragraphs (or like, extended long passages, lmao); when there needs to be a cut from A to B, there's a cut.

i think i've carried that click over into NQ in a way that works for me; i've got a few transitions in further chapters that feel wonky but it's nothing an editing pass won't fix. as a whole, though, each chapter ends where it needs to end and the next one starts where it needs to start. nice and clean. and it's especially important to me to nail that since this is alternating POV; i don't want people to be confused or for any of my Little Details to get lost in the shuffle, and i also obviously want to feel good about this.

on a similar note, i would be lying if i said i wasn't tempted to rewrite P vs NP to bring chorus itself into compliance with canon. not that i think it needs to be more canon-compliant, but wiggling through canon and making things work for me is the whole reason i write relatively canon-compliant, in-universe fic in the first place. i really enjoy the challenge of adapting whatever my idea is to the general sandbox of canon and vice versa; if i ever do do this, it'd be primarily for that reason. or like, idk, maybe i could just draft up a series of notes or something and make a big post about i'd write P vs NP if i were writing it from scratch now, growing the fic from the seed of "maine is alive and found out somehow that hargrove is involved." idk! even though i have functionally rewritten the fic in its entirety between 2019 and 2021, there are a lot of things i would still change. but hey, i guess that's partially what NQ is about: doing P vs NP, again, but with my 2023 skills.

even still, i found myself on the fence several times while writing NQ (and even now as i write this, tbh) about whether or not i should have just made this fic a standalone and not part of P vs NP. i'm really just carrying over the bare minimum from P vs NP: doyle's still alive because that shook out differently, epsilon is still gone (even though at this point i actually have very different feelings about epsilon), and there are loose ends to tie up. this could very easily have just been its own thing with someone else to be the alternate POV instead of maine. but i guess at the end of the day, this is for me and i want to put my grubby washmaine hands over everything. so i will.

in any case, i'm very happy with how NQ has turned out. it's funny, i did the same thing with the end of this fic as i did with P vs NP; i rushed to spit out the bare minimum of connective tissue to wrap up the last two chapters just so that my brain could put it in the "done" folder, and with that i've allowed myself to start posting chapters and in doing so have created mini deadlines for editing. the things we do to trick our brains into functioning.

DW still feels like a nicer place to put Fic Thoughts than tungle, even though i'm using tungle regularly again. i should go back to putting fic thoughts here. :B