fic talk: yeah, fuck it, alright

[sword_logic]

i was REALLY in my feelings about this last week but spent some time letting the thoughts percolate, and you know what, i AM going to do a thorough, bottom-to-top overhaul/edit/rewrite/whatever of P vs NP.

P vs NP was written in short bursts: first between 2014 and 2015, then in 2016, then in 2019, then in 2020, and finally in 2021. this is a very long series of stretches between years, during which my writing has changed in terms of both process and end result. in spite of the editing i’ve done on individual parts, this fic still has never gotten one single cohesive editing pass as whole so you know what, 2023 might as well be the year for it.

no quarter was the longest thing i've written since P vs NP, and i still think it's fair to call it the longest thing i've written specifically because P vs NP was basically written as 3 separate fics. i think that if i sat down to write P vs NP from scratch right now, it would probably end up being around 50k-70k as well. my goal for no quarter was to find a balance between writing tightly and making all of it a treat for myself, and i think i succeeded! writing tightly is a challenge for me because boy do i sure love a good meander, but it's also sooo satisfying to me to look back at something and think "ah yes, all of this had a reason and a purpose, even the silly or meandering parts."

there are a few surface-level edits i want to make that i caught when i did a re-read while writing no quarter; i've fixed some misc. typos and stuff like a few remnant uses of "COM" instead of "comm" (the halo novels use the former so that's how i started out, but imo "comm"/"comms" works better and doesn't have the weird homonym-ness with, like, FLEETCOM, HIGHCOM, etc.) in the docs i've created so far. i will also actually fucking add horizontal rules to this. (i have no idea what i had against them originally. wtf, past!me.) the rest of the edits i want to make run a lot deeper than that, and i'm still not quite sure how i want to tackle them. i think the fic is emotionally muddled and not in a good way; a friend called one part of no quarter "murky" and ugh that's such a good word/mood for Emotional Turmoil, but P vs NP is not murky (pleasing) but rather muddled (unflattering). there are a lot of emotional things i want to straighten out.

i've been trying to phrase this in like a value-neutral sort of way but like, fuck it: i don't like that half the fic's internal narration sounds like a self-help book. (no hate to self-help books, ykwim.) there was a point in my life where that kind of thing was very helpful to me, which is when it was very novel for me to have A Word For That (in multiple senses); the start of P vs NP in particular reflects that, but it's still there in a lot of other places, too. for years and years and years now i've stopped connecting to it at all, and at this point in my life i think that fics where a character is doing therapy in their brain are, at best, very boring. there are a lot of "mental health"... plot points? scenes? that i want to change.

along with that, there is also a weird amount of dead air in the fic to me; scenes that are there because i didn't know how else to physically move wash and maine forward (like, traveling) and a lot of really strange scene breaks/transitions. the more i think about it, the more i'm leaning towards just.... doing a full rewrite, like, putting blank document and previous version side-by-side and just going for it. if nothing else, this would be a new Writing Experience and i think it'd be kind of fun.

my notes so far just cover a few things i know i want to change, and my next thing to tackle is going to be a bare-bones plot outline to see if anything needs to change in that department. i really like the changes i made in part I, and there are a lot of things i like about the rest of the fic! but i know there is a lot that can stand to be better, which is the long and short of why i want to do this. this fic is simultaneously my baby and my white whale. i've had the "i could do it better now" feeling about a lot of things i've written or drawn, but nothing ever like what i feel about P vs NP. then again, i've never taken so long to make one thing. and that's why i want to do it again! i can do it better in one metaphorical sitting than the piecemeal patchwork of writing it currently is.