My Compromise to Myself · 11:29am Oct 24th, 2023
So I mentioned before that I've been very tempted to completely re-write CotE. When I first started writing it, I didn't have a complete picture or direction to take it as it was simply a story that was supposed to be episodic and silly and a way for me to experiment and improve my writing. But then I got really, really attached to these characters and I started truly investing in the story, however, the more I wrote, the more unhappy I became with the story as a whole as it seemed very patchwork to me. It's this reason why it's taking me so long to write the new chapter as every time I sit down to work on it I keep getting distracted by what I've written before. I don't want to restart everything though because I learned a lot through what I have written and I challenged myself in the beginning to see through to the end no matter what happens. So I came up with a sort of compromise for myself. I won't be re-writing the story from scratch, instead, I have decided to place CotE under what I hereby dub "The Grand Revision Plan"!
Essentially what I'm doing is keeping all the chapters I've written as well as keeping the main points from said chapters, but I'm changing how they are presented and structured. Technically speaking, you won't need to re-read any of the chapters I'm revising, but I will highly recommend doing so once this project is complete as there will be additional key moments. (i.e. Wave will be introduced in the first chapter. Currently, she's not in the first chapter because she wasn't a character back when I first wrote it). So basically I'm doing the middle ground between a re-edit and and a re-write. This is something I tried not to bog myself down with, but in the end, I had to do something just to better satisfy myself for, as I mentioned previously, I was growing more and more unhappy with what was written as I continued to write more.
I can't promise how long this process will take as things have been extremely busy for me lately for reasons I'll not go into. I will say that, so far, I've worked on the first chapter for about a month and it's just about complete with its revision. I plan to release all the revised chapters at once (along with the actual new chapter), but that does leave me a question as to how to go about this. Should I paste them into the chapters already out (what my initial plan is)? Or should I release them as their own new chapters? This is all about how notifications work so I'm asking you all what you prefer.
your initial plan sounds good
Neat to see it continue, I can’t remember mutch by than, but it will be worth a read. Re-reading so dar was worth it
Well, this is very subjective when it comes to revisions: would you replace or publish as a new chapter?
I would say that if you revised the chapter, FiMfiction doesn't really notify readers that it has been changed. The only way to probably trigger this is to unpublish and publish the chapter. For readability sake, maybe add a (revised 20xx) or whatever date it is.
The other way is to hide the chapters and just publish a fresh chapter as the revised one. The issue that could come from this is that the reader could feel cheated, probably not, about reading for nothing. But the only issue this would pose is that the story's publish date doesn't match the chapter publish dates. Very minor, unless if you got OCD or something neurotic, then it might bug you.
It really depends on how you feel. Would you want to preserve your work for prosterity's sake by unpublishing the chapter so you could look back at your first attempts and reminisce how far you've come?
Or are you the type that looks forward to the future and just replace the chapters with the new you?
5751978
Initially my thoughts are to take the original chapters and move them into blog posts or something of the like and paste the revised edition into the already published chapters. Then I'd link the original chapter with the revised chapter so others can see the changes made as well if they so desire to. Part of my worry is making sure my audience doesn't feel cheated which is why I want to release the new chapter with my revised edition which will effectively take care of the notification aspect. I do want to let others read the old ch if they want to, but I don't want to complicate the UI
I'm undecided when it comes to the dates though.