Negrek _Admin

Website: Thousand Roads

Posted August 30 2015 in reply to Butterfree

Heh, I don't think I did a lot of fussing over my writing at all back then. Chapters I was looking forward to were just "yay I'm finally writing this part!", not "oh no I must do this part justice". It was a magical carefree time where taking a month to write a chapter warranted a "finally" and I regularly declared a chapter was great in my author's notes. Even when I considered my older work terrible, I had pretty absolute confidence in what I was writing at any given time -my taste hadn't really evolved much ahead of my actual skill yet, so I was pretty satisfied with what I produced.

Haha, fair enough, that makes sense. Maybe the sheer fact that you didn't even bother to question whether it was a good idea was a pretty good indicator that it was? Mostly this article is in response to people who are weighing the idea of doing a rewrite, and in their case perhaps the fact that they're doubting/weighing in the first place is the first indicator that it might not be a great move? If you're not fussing over your work, you probably aren't in a place that you're going to end up getting stuck on the rewrite, since you'll be prepared to just plow through that, too...

I remember those days, though, man. I used to be able to bang a chapter out in two hours, then upload it to FFN with maybe some cursory proofreading at best, and feel pretty damn awesome. Those were good times. (But they were not good chapters. :P)

It's possible that if I'd dropped/finished TQftL back in 2003, I would have had some amazing idea after it that I'd have written instead, sure. Would I love that story significantly more than I love TQftL today? I'm going to say probably not, even if it were objectively better. Given that, I have no regrets.

I gotcha. Since I don't have a large project along the lines of TQftL, I probably over-value moving on to new material. It was also interesting to read your views on your different stories, since I only have a reader's perspective on them. (I also agree that Morphic is "good enough," and actually I think it's kind of interesting how much better it is than most of the other stuff you wrote in 2007, no offense to the other stuff you wrote in 2007.)

Thanks again for weighing in on this. And like I said, I hope it didn't come across like I was saying "you made the WRONG DECISION you shouldn't have done that rewrite;" I just wanted to try to understand where you were coming from, since we have different perspectives on the issue. It definitely sounds like you made the best choice for your story, and I'm glad you feel good about it! ---So how are Chapter 66-69 edits coming along?---

(Also, I think you may be missing an error message if the CAPTCHA check has, presumably, expired? When I tried to post this, nothing happened and I just got a different Pokémon.)

Ohhh, Phoenixsong had that error, too, but she wasn't able to reproduce it. I bet you're right and it's the security token that's expiring (it's set to expire after an hour, if that helps decide if that was what happened to you?); I did not even realize that could happen and didn't include an error message for it.

(Also, bug: pressing Enter after typing the CAPTCHA refreshes the Pokémon rather than submitting the post, presumably because it acts like pressing the first submit button in the form.)

Yesss, that's a known bug that I was putting off fixing because it was more nuisance than critical, but it definitely is a nuisance. >>;

(Also, when I tried actually pressing the Post button with my mouse, I got a 500 error?)

After the CAPTCHA image switching instead of the submit? Hmm, haven't had THAT happen before. I'll investigate.

Whoops, looks like it submitted itself anyway. Sorry for the double post and my floundering "what is going on" parentheticals.

Not at all! Thanks so much for letting me know the problems you were having, and sorry for subjecting you to my awful half-baked code. I swear everything works great on my computer! D:

(Aaaaa I'm about to go on a vacation, too, not sure how much I'll be able to fix up before I take off...)