Learning To Fly edit
Nov. 7th, 2024 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flameandsongIn November 2020, my friendship with another fanfic author came to an end, and with it, our collaboration, with shared universes and borrowing each other's OCs, most notably with my universe Learning To Fly. While I had written permission to continue writing her OCs, I decided against it because I didn't want to further entangle our stuff, but because of how far I had gotten with Learning To Fly, I was faced with a dilemma. At that time, I decided to take the easy road of changing the names of her OCs, so Claire became Karen, Gil became Geir, Theo became Craig, Harrison became Ben, and Luc became Pierre. I also changed certain details, an example being: Gil the ballet dancer with London's Royal Opera became Geir the flautist with the London Philharmonic.
This was more or less fine with me for about two years, except that after I completed the series in September 2021, I stopped being able to re-read it. Some of that was because of the comments left by ex-friends, which were too triggering to look at [to clarify: the comments themselves were fine, it was the reminder of the people involved that was triggering], and some of that was because I was also triggered by the presence of the pastiche OCs. I told myself that a lot of authors can't re-read their old fic and managed to let it be for awhile.
And then the drama started up again in January 2023, and it stopped being fine. So my brain made me put everything to the side and do two things.
The first was to get rid of the pastiche OCs altogether, and have the series focus on Sören, Anthony, Nicholas and Maglor. Pre-edit, Learning To Fly came in at 1,098,569 words. As of January 28th 2023, the series is 645,181 words long. I deleted my fics Warm In December, You Give Me Fever and Leave A Light On. [You Give Me Fever was title-borrowed and one element was reworked into another fic involving Sören and Nicholas in 2024. I may rework the others as standalones down the road but that is absolutely not a priority right now.] After the Rain went down by one chapter, and Stepping On the Pieces of My Broken Shell went up by one chapter. The most significant changes were to Broken Wings [pre-edit: 40 chapters and 280,358 words; post-edit: 19 chapters and 109,829 words] and Love Is A Long Road [pre-edit: 24 chapters and 147,001 words; post-edit: 13 chapters and 71,356 words]. Extremely negligible, nobody-will-notice-but-me edits were made to Rain Falls, You Sang To Me and Rise and the chapter count did not change and the word count did not take a significant hit.
The second task was to delete all the comments left by ex-friends so I no longer have to look at them if I re-read my older fic - not just on Learning To Fly but everything pre-2021 - and so I stop giving them free publicity [as this thing kept happening where someone would start looking at my older fic, notice their comments from when our universes were enmeshed, go look at their stuff, and promptly fuck off and never interact with me again]. But I needed to make a copy so I could have proof that a certain person was leaving me friendly/positive comments on my fic as late as October/November 2019 [which punches a big hole in their story that they hated me from April 2019 on, if they did they were certainly two-faced about it]. The albums are here, and the last documented comments I have are here. [There were others from November 2019 that this person deleted on their own from before AO3 rolled out blocking ((you can't delete your comments on stuff if someone blocked you)), which was probably to hide evidence once they noticed I was getting receipts of everything, but I still have these.]
The reason for this post is thus to serve as an explanation. Not a lot of people read my older fic compared to stuff I've written from mid/late 2021 on, nonetheless I have to operate on the assumption that a non-zero percentage of people will notice the huge drop in word count on LTF and that three fics are missing and a shitload of comments are wiped, hence the need for this explanation. Hindsight being 20/20, I wish I had taken a couple months off writing at the end of 2020/beginning of 2021 to rework the Learning To Fly universe, because the shortcut I took [renaming Claire, etc] in November 2020 ultimately cost me a lot of work and aggravation and literal migraines longer-term.
However, with that said, I also feel like the edits I made to Learning To Fly - "punching it up" to focus exclusively on Anthony, Sören, Maglor and Nicholas - makes it flow a lot better now. It meandered a lot pre-edits like doing endless side quests with a bunch of NPCs that get in the way of the main story. ALSO, Sören being in an eventual quad with his job in that universe and the kind of hours he works is tough enough, never mind having other partners besides that. [I wrote the bulk of LTF before long COVID handed my ass to me so tired, long COVID-addled me was looking at Sören with Nicholas, Anthony, Geir, Craig AND Karen like "BOI HOW." It was exhausting just reading that, holy shit.] There's more I could say but I have zero spoons, so I'll start wrapping up the explanation here.
This was more or less fine with me for about two years, except that after I completed the series in September 2021, I stopped being able to re-read it. Some of that was because of the comments left by ex-friends, which were too triggering to look at [to clarify: the comments themselves were fine, it was the reminder of the people involved that was triggering], and some of that was because I was also triggered by the presence of the pastiche OCs. I told myself that a lot of authors can't re-read their old fic and managed to let it be for awhile.
And then the drama started up again in January 2023, and it stopped being fine. So my brain made me put everything to the side and do two things.
The first was to get rid of the pastiche OCs altogether, and have the series focus on Sören, Anthony, Nicholas and Maglor. Pre-edit, Learning To Fly came in at 1,098,569 words. As of January 28th 2023, the series is 645,181 words long. I deleted my fics Warm In December, You Give Me Fever and Leave A Light On. [You Give Me Fever was title-borrowed and one element was reworked into another fic involving Sören and Nicholas in 2024. I may rework the others as standalones down the road but that is absolutely not a priority right now.] After the Rain went down by one chapter, and Stepping On the Pieces of My Broken Shell went up by one chapter. The most significant changes were to Broken Wings [pre-edit: 40 chapters and 280,358 words; post-edit: 19 chapters and 109,829 words] and Love Is A Long Road [pre-edit: 24 chapters and 147,001 words; post-edit: 13 chapters and 71,356 words]. Extremely negligible, nobody-will-notice-but-me edits were made to Rain Falls, You Sang To Me and Rise and the chapter count did not change and the word count did not take a significant hit.
The second task was to delete all the comments left by ex-friends so I no longer have to look at them if I re-read my older fic - not just on Learning To Fly but everything pre-2021 - and so I stop giving them free publicity [as this thing kept happening where someone would start looking at my older fic, notice their comments from when our universes were enmeshed, go look at their stuff, and promptly fuck off and never interact with me again]. But I needed to make a copy so I could have proof that a certain person was leaving me friendly/positive comments on my fic as late as October/November 2019 [which punches a big hole in their story that they hated me from April 2019 on, if they did they were certainly two-faced about it]. The albums are here, and the last documented comments I have are here. [There were others from November 2019 that this person deleted on their own from before AO3 rolled out blocking ((you can't delete your comments on stuff if someone blocked you)), which was probably to hide evidence once they noticed I was getting receipts of everything, but I still have these.]
The reason for this post is thus to serve as an explanation. Not a lot of people read my older fic compared to stuff I've written from mid/late 2021 on, nonetheless I have to operate on the assumption that a non-zero percentage of people will notice the huge drop in word count on LTF and that three fics are missing and a shitload of comments are wiped, hence the need for this explanation. Hindsight being 20/20, I wish I had taken a couple months off writing at the end of 2020/beginning of 2021 to rework the Learning To Fly universe, because the shortcut I took [renaming Claire, etc] in November 2020 ultimately cost me a lot of work and aggravation and literal migraines longer-term.
However, with that said, I also feel like the edits I made to Learning To Fly - "punching it up" to focus exclusively on Anthony, Sören, Maglor and Nicholas - makes it flow a lot better now. It meandered a lot pre-edits like doing endless side quests with a bunch of NPCs that get in the way of the main story. ALSO, Sören being in an eventual quad with his job in that universe and the kind of hours he works is tough enough, never mind having other partners besides that. [I wrote the bulk of LTF before long COVID handed my ass to me so tired, long COVID-addled me was looking at Sören with Nicholas, Anthony, Geir, Craig AND Karen like "BOI HOW." It was exhausting just reading that, holy shit.] There's more I could say but I have zero spoons, so I'll start wrapping up the explanation here.
