It's Going To Be A Close One · 6:05pm Jul 10th, 2015
Even after having put Chapter 5 aside until I have the time to do it justice and focusing on finishing Chapter 4B instead, I am still working on the rewrite right now. I've been at this one for months, but there's still a major section left to go even after I spent most of today working on it. It'll be done before I leave, but I'll be running very low on time if I want to give this the editing sweep it deserves, so expect a late one.
Part of the reason this is taking so long is because the chapter rewrite itself is really, really damn long. To put it into perspective, the current version of the chapter is 8,119 words long, complete; the rewrite, on the other hand, is still missing almost everything from Celestia's faked collapse onwards, and currently clocks in at 10,331 words. Given that the plan was to extend Chrysalis and Celestia's mental battle into two scenes rather than one, I can honestly see this rewrite stretching to 12,000 words or more by the time it's done.
It's a lot of work, but at the same time, it's satisfying to be able to give this chapter a second shot and add more detail in that was missing from the first one. I wish I had the luxury of more time, but I did promise you an update before I leave for Australia, and Chapter 5 is weeks away from being where I want it to be.
Additionally, upon rewriting, I've come to realise that I have a tendency to write Celestia incredibly antagonistically, which I've been glad for the opportunity to correct. She's still tough to write, but I'm getting more comfortable writing her without going to far to either extreme.
Anyway, I've got a chapter to (re)write, so I'll send you another blog post when the revised chapter's up.
It's good to hear everything is going well and you are happy with the rewrite, although I do want to say that we will understand if you cannot get it out the door before you go. Rushing things rarely works out particularly well, and you did say you will have some limited ability to work on your phone so it might not be a bad idea to do some of your editing on that rather than release it unedited because editing is mostly looking for mistakes which the phone should be fine for.
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I should have it finished before I go, even if I'm going to need to write the very last of it tomorrow, but either way, I'm going to upload it as its own, separate chapter, rather than overwrite the original version. That will let me keep the revised version unpublished until it's edited, and then I can switch the two versions' positions so that the revision sits in the main story and the original remains for posterity's sake at the very end of the story (with a non-canon tag attached, since I've changed a few things).
My only issue with editing is that in mobile FimFic (on my phone at least) the edge of the text box you write your story in goes off the side of the screen, cutting the last few words of each line out of view. Since there's not a horizontal scroll bar, this is a pretty big problem in regards to editing, since the words I'm trying to change might simply be off the screen and as such inaccessible without deleting a bunch of text that was perfectly fine just to get it where I can edit it.
It's a pain, which is why I'm trying to get all of it done before I leave, but I'll do my best in the event that I don't get through it all in time.
Thanks for the support!
3226850 That's good to hear, and I want to suggest hitting enter instead of deleting words to edit. That will kick it down to the next line quite nicely and you can easily remove the paragraph break once you are done.
3226882 Why didn't I think of that?
Thanks again!
3226900 No problem, we all do stupid things like that from time to time.
Well, good luck and I look forward to seeing what you come up with.