Butterfree

Website: The Cave of Dragonflies

Posted August 30 2015 in reply to Negrek

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?

Perhaps! I did think something like that when I was writing my original comment - that when you're in that sort of state of mind about your writing where you can churn out chapters at a breakneck pace with no hangups, rewriting is a lot less costly than when you deliberate over every word. The good-enough zone is probably not defined only by the story not needing rewriting as much, but also significantly by how much longer it'll probably take you to rewrite once you've achieved a certain level of competence.

I gotcha. Since I don't have a large project along the lines of TQftL, I probably over-value moving on to new material.

That or I'm a sentimental sap who over-values old stuff. :P I have a major tendency to be extremely attached to anything I've owned or worked on for a very long time, so I'm probably less enthused about doing something shiny and new than most people. (See also how most of my future fanfiction plans seem to be rewriting or continuing my existing completed stuff.) I don't really expect anyone else to see things the same way I do, but for me personally I'm quite happy to have been working on TQftL all this time rather than doing something else.

(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.)

Ahaha, I'm actually wayyyy more cringey about the early Morphic chapters than the QftL chapters I wrote around that time, or even earlier. I can't even properly tell you how I feel about their objective quality because I have this powerful physical aversion to even looking at them, so I've made, like, one attempt to reread them in the past five-plus years (but I spent most of that one attempt internally screaming at how exaggerated and fake everything was and being horrified I haven't gotten around to that rewrite yet). But that likely has something to do with the fact Morphic is a lot more adult and ambitious, which sort of sets a higher bar for a lot of things. I do think it's definitely better overall than anything else I was writing around that time.

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.

Oh, no, I didn't think so. If my comment came off as defensive, that's my bad. I'm not really even trying to persuade you of the validity of my rewrites, just musing on my personal experiences with and feelings about them.

So how are Chapter 66-69 edits coming along?

I haven't been working on them much lately, unfortunately - been busy with other stuff. So I'm still in a similar place of making some final edits to 66 and then getting on with 67.

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.

It had been probably over 24 hours since I loaded the page, so yeah, it would definitely have expired.