Electro Swing Editing Progress Report 1: Rewrote Chapters 1-3 Also Thanks for Not Giving Up at Chapter 2 · 12:28pm Dec 15th, 2023
Chapters Revisited: 3/61 Changes: Chapters 1 through 3 Substantially Rewritten
Holy crap... those descriptions were 2015 levels of bad...
I'll be posting these regularly as I make major changes. I saw a comment or two as well as heard from Discord buddies that said they want to reread all of the story from beginning to end now that the story is completed. While it is completed and you can read the story from beginning to end, I want to ensure that it's a good read from beginning to end. I know I've improved over the two and a third-ish years of writing this constantly and gotten way better since I wrote the first five chapters' drafts back in 2015-2016. Back then it was called Unforgiven rather than Electro Swing. I'm not sure I even knew Electro Swing was even a thing back then.
To be 100% clear: Nothing plot-wise will change. The gist of every event in the story is set in stone, for better or worse. I am just cleaning up wording and small details. Any major changes will only be to the execution of a scene, OOC moments, and wording inconsistencies. I promise the story will still end up in the same place.
If you do reread, feel free to PM me with any issues you see with the rewritten chapters. I have specifically not asked AP, Alchemik, or Jym to help me in this, though Jym's helping anyway. It's mostly because I've already asked so much from them in Electro Swing already and I do not want to ask them to look over the work they already checked AGAIN since it'd be asking them to check the 423K words once more. Instead, if you are reading Electro Swing again or for the first time, I'd greatly appreciate it since you'll be helping it be a better read for anyone coming in behind you. I do have a reader who's offered to do it already as I go, but I won't drop names since I don't want to add public pressure. I am very grateful for their time and will be adding them to the credits of the fic since they've offered to do it for every chapter (it also helps that they're reading it for the first time and they're a badass for doing it.) Much love to everyone who finds something that I missed, especially in these first three chapters I checked so far.
And to elaborate on those chapters I've checked specifically, let me just first say... Umm. Wow. Thank you so much for getting through the start. Maybe it's just me, but those were really, really rough. Those were made before AP came around to hold my feet to the fire, so thank you very much for your hard work again as well as anyone who has ever preread for me. I just started going through 4 and am very thankful that it's getting better as I go along. I don't feel the urge to rewrite every single paragraph. I now dread any reviews that anyone decides to do until I've done a full checkup on it, but that's the price of doing regular updates rather than polishing it to a sparkle before publishing. I need comments too much to stay motivated to do that though. Anyway...
As far as changes are concerned, here's a sample of some of the stuff I've gone back to fix.
- Repaired continuity errors regarding Vinyl's research. All I knew early on was I wanted them to explode. Came up with the runes later.
- Removed some setups that never went anywhere.
- Reworded lots of dialogue and character actions that were OOC. For example: Fancy says he worries about folks being afraid of him in chapter 3, but laughs at someone getting nervous around him in chapter 2.
- Cleaned up descriptions that were written when I was still unlearning adjective essay padding from college.
- Tweaked some foreshadowing to match the pacing. Some of it was heavier handed earlier when I thought it was only going to be a 20 chapter story.
- Removing instances of damn and hell. In hindsight, damn doesn't make sense as a curse in-universe as its very rooted in Christianity. Same with hell. Plus, my parents want to read this story and they don't like those words, so why not just crank up the horse terms instead?
Hopefully it'll be easier moving forward. I do know I've wanted to change the fencing terms in chapter 4 because I dropped the idea that Fancy fenced when I started writing again in 2020. and Redo the conflict in chapter 18 so that it's not just "okay" so quickly. Bet Falk will be looking forward to that change.
In other news, there should be a special treat coming down the line that I've been wanting to do for a while with Electro Swing, but I had to finish writing the dang thing first. Hopefully that will be a quick and painless thing to write and then I can focus on getting Electro Swing polished over the winter break. Once it's where I want it to be, the wrap-up blog with some fun little details, comment responses I couldn't do while writing, and the dating thing I do for most of my romances will be posted for you guys to have fun with.
Thanks for reading this long blog and see you in the next one,
- Rego
Y'know, it just hit me: there is officially a non-zero chance I stumbled upon the genre before you did. How about them apples? Wait, nope, wrong fic.
Either way, best of luck with the extra once-over! I'm a bit tied down by my own goings-on at the moment, but I might try and chip in if I can find the time to dig the URLs out of my sandbox of an inbox. :)