Pardon My Editing · 5:27am Nov 20th, 2014
I'm not super up-to-date on how the story update feeds work here on FIMFiction since I'm not a huge reader in general (let alone reader of fanfiction,) so pardon me if you see a flurry of updates to old chapters of Necessary Love. Just some routine editing and cleanup of the story grammatically; no changes of story content.
Honestly though, I don't like editing.
I guess it would be too much to say I hate it. There is some secret joy to the act of it; to finalizing arrangements; to taking working things and tweaking them iteratively to be just a little bit better. But oof can it ever be onerous.
At least for me with writing, that's how it feels. Refining some code for an application is one thing; the little perfections and optimizations there just add up and 'click' in my head, making editing experimentation fun there. But for whatever reason when I write that same process of editing and revision is different. When I read I want to be reading; absorbing the words into my blood. I don't want to look at a string of sounds and process and interpret and analyze them, like following a set of instructions. I want it to come in whole and pure. I want it to conjure images and sounds and colors in my head immediately. And that makes reading slowly with part of your brain partitioned for error detection both problematic and kind of boring.
And boring is the fun-killer.
I tend to write a chapter out in whole before I begin editing it, and then I only give it two or three editing passes. It works enough for me, and I understand my error rate with it is low enough to be pleasantly readable; every chapter has its own little problems but you only get a slight amount of the awkward phrasing, excessive commas, omitted word, incorrect spelling, etc. Those little troubles are the price I pay for not subjecting myself to more rigorous editing standards, but the benefit of being my own target audience is that I can live with that.
But then you jerks came along and started reading, and now I have to meet your standards. (I kid of course, on both accounts; you people are lovely and I'll write to whatever standard pleases me.) I wrote What Separates and picked up immediately afterwards that it was still riddled with tiny errors that should be corrected but I merely shrugged my shoulders and told myself, "Maybe I'll get to it some day." I haven't gotten to it; those errors are still there. When Melancholy Days finished my reaction was kind of different. I'll admit that having an audience does trigger a bit of a responsibility-response; I feel a little compelled to clean up after myself grammatically as an act of respect to guests; you know, "Welcome to my house, here's the bowl of M&Ms." I think that combined with the natural allure of ironing out rough edges was enough to get me to behave differently after that story.
With Melancholy Days I did some editing immediately after it was complete, wading through the story and getting corrections uploaded chapter by chapter. I'm happy I did it in most respects; the writing of it is in better shape structurally than it was to start with and is more readable on the whole. But ooughh it was murderous to plow through all 185,000 words of that sucker in scan mode. And, of course, I'm aware that it still has a few lingering errors because my accursed eyeballs want to see the forest, not the trees.
That experience has changed my thinking a little bit with respect to Necessary Love. I don't want to slog through another whale of a tale with editing for future readers; no disrespect to you all intended. I would like to claim the benefits of better editing so it doesn't sit in a bruised state like What Separates however. Right now, eight chapters in, I'm sitting at a hefty 67,000 thousand words in Necessary Love. So I've decided to do the re-editing of this chunk now while it is only that large, in the hopes that I'll spare myself the blood-letting in the future. Another eight chapters or so and I'll re-edit that set of eight, and so on.
So, again, I apologize if you're being bombarded with dire warnings that history is being rewritten right in the middle of the story. You are being lied to by your feed. It's just your friendly writing gnomes doing some small fixings in the dark while we plow on ahead.
Very quickly, a note on story status: I'm super happy with Necessary Love so far and things are continuing enjoyably. It's been a lot of fun and I expect that to continue. In particular this is a story which allows itself to have so much more fun compared to the previous tales. I always include humor in my writing - just how I am - but there was a real degree to which the other stories had to hold back some on the unchained fun (in story content.) What Separates had its focus on the role of violence and the hesitant "confronting newness" in the story; things had to be sort of slow, and concealed, and cautious. Melancholy Days dealt with depression so there's really only so many yuks you can throw in there without ruining things. With all that moved past, we are at last at a story that is enabled to breath so freely; that can have so much unbridled fun. This is why we have such joyful things as carnage in the market place and shenanigans by the Crusaders. It's a blast.
Don't get too used to it, though. Things are going to get more serious later.
Thanks for reading!
- Zurock
