Incoming Updates to 'Scars' · 2:54am Jun 25th, 2014
Edit 2: ...And I farked up royally. Instead of copy-pasting my updates, I deleted the old chapters and published the new ones in their place... Which is against site rules. My apologies to all, as that was never my intention. :(
Edit: Update is live!
*Adding a bit of context here for the benefit of my newest followers*
Hot on the heels of my 'less disastrous than I expected it to be' showing in the TwiDash 3.0 Contest, I threw my name in the hat for the unofficial "TwiDash 3.5" contest, which was conducted as a side-car event to the ongoing 'official' writing challenges in the TwiDash group. To my utter shock, my entry, 'Scars' somehow took first place in the contest. To this day, I still shake my head at the idea that my second-ever piece of fiction writing even did well, much less won a contest of any sort.
Now bursting with pride (and maybe a smidgen of ego), I submitted 'Scars' to both EQD and the Royal Guard, fully expecting to be welcomed with open arms. After all, I did just win a contest, so I have to get in here, right?
Rejected on both counts. I was admittedly a bit upset at first, but my wife convinced me to step back, take a breather, and revisit it.
Well, here we are, nearly 3/4 of a year later, but I finally had a spark of motivation to dive back into this story and try to improve/enhance it. Between the feedback from the reviewers and the experience I've gained pre-reading 'Moonstone', I ended up massaging the vast majority of the story in one way or another. It's a good bit shorter now, but what's there is much leaner and more efficient, and with a much improved pacing too.
In the next hour or so, I'll be replacing the original text with the revised narrative, and "publishing" an extra chapter that will contain the original text in an archival format. Again, the original text will still be here; I'm just updating the chapters directly in order to avoid running afoul of the "no repeat publishing" rules. If all goes well, I'll resubmit this to EQD/TRG, and cross my fingers big-time.
Cheers!
GMP
I'm tentatively excited for this. Revisions tend to be messy work, and can be mis-handled easily. You of all people should know this from our work on the infamous chapter 18.
I'll walk into this with cautious optimism.
2231982
Oh, don't I know it.
I think stepping away from it for so long really helped me out, as I was able to really approach this with my pre-reading hat on. A lot of the "fit-n-finish" aspects that you've taught me were a huge boon here as I cleaned up grammar and flow issues too.
At the end of the day, the like/dislike is up to you, but I hope you'll not come away feeling like I butchered the poor thing.
2231994
on the subject of chapters... how goes 19?
2232050
Well, the revisions are live, so feel free to check it out. I hope you like it!