fic talk: moratorium? retrospective?

[sword_logic]

there's a word for this, i just can't remember what it is right now. (stares into half-empty cup of coffee, waiting for answers to manifest alongside awakeness.) but! a more cohesive series of thoughts on part 2 of S11 au now that i'm done.

i think the biggest emotion/reaction i'm feeling right now is the persistent temptation to go back to part 1 and edit the living hell out of it. it's been five years since i started writing this fic, and three years since i finished, edited, and posted part 1. i've changed as a person and as a writer in a lot of ways since then; my style has changed; and, most importantly (and glaringly) to me, what i find necessary to highlight, imply, and outright state about the way these characters live the symptoms of mental illness i find in them has changed. the way i think about and deal with what my Brain Chemicals throw at me has changed, and to me, nothing shows that change more than looking back through the oldest parts of my writing and seeing my own thought processes reflected there. i was in a very different place when i published the first part, and while that's okay, i want to reflect my own growth there, too.

furthermore, part 1 is still full of relics from when this fic was going to be very different, some of which i cut out when editing, and some of which stayed, and at this point i feel like some of the things that ended up staying should actually have gone. some of the humor isn't consistent with how i think about this fic currently. so on, so forth.

i'd like to do a comprehensive edit on part 1, but i also think i'd like to do it when this whole thing is done, signed, sealed, delivered. and who knows! maybe at that point, i won't find the differences as glaring, i'll be gentler about nitpicking, the fic will change again, or (spins wheel) wash is going to (throws dart) be transported via Plot Device into a modern au and adopt the fictional version of my cat.

moving on to actually talking about part 2 now: writing this was a really enjoyable process, even though i got stuck quite a few times. looking back through older posts, i think i actually wrote most of this part in about 4 months — even though it feels so much longer than that. by a rough estimate, less than 7k words in this part were pulled from what i had written previously (thank you, brain for vividly remembering when i wrote certain passages). that means that i wrote about 15k words in the span of the past 4 months, and taking into account vacation and mainlining destiny and We Are Understaffed At Work During The Time Of Year We Have Literally Twice The Amount Of Patrons As Usual, that feels so huge to me.

my planning and outlining during this part was also a huge help, and i'm looking forward to setting aside time to do more work on my outline for part 3. i'm about a third of the way through a first pass on editing, mostly hunting down typos and other surface-level things, and i'm going to try my best to patiently set this fic down for about a week (tab closed! no nitpicks! nothing!) to go back to it with fresher eyes next weekend for deeper edits, and then from there, depending on if i shuffle around a few things near the end, i'll go back over my outline for part 3.

i'm so excited to share this. this idea has been knocking around in my head for 5 and a half years and while i could try to talk about how it's Important and Self-Reflective and all that... i was thinking about it last night, and you know what? it's not that deep. it isn't! i just love this idea and i'm excited to share it with the world. that's really all there is to it.

Comments

[anneapocalypse]

Man, I relate to all of this SO much. I think it's the nature of any kind of serial fiction to want to do that kind of updating--and the nice thing about the way we publish fanfiction is you can do it, if you want to. I made some edits on the first fic in my trilogy before publishing the third one, and now that I'm working on another longfic that's kind of the conclusion to a series, it's interesting to look back at the way my ideas progressed over time. Sometimes I want to update things; sometimes I just want to leave that visible train of thought as it is. But it's always interesting to see how your own ideas have evolved.

Good luck!!

[sword_logic]

yeah, hard agree on wanting to leave that visible train of thought. it's pretty cool to be able to look back and see change, but on the other hand, ooooooh, that burn of wanting to Fix and Nitpick and Change Things.