Wraith island
Apr. 2nd, 2008 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321In other news: I spent three hours today, revising my wraith fic, Ichor. Sheppard/wraith fic, I should say.
I have never spent as much time revising any fic. This is the seventh or so draft. It's been through four betas and 2 1/2 years of writes and re-writes.
Some bits read (to me) incredibly smoothly and needed hardly any revising. These are the bits I wrote most recently. No wonder, in a way but also interesting: how living with a text for so long will actually hone your style and oil the writing.
Some bits read more clunkily (to me), and they are inevitably those written very early on in the process (interestingly, not the ones written first). So now I'm thinking: egads, I thought this was the penultimate draft but do I need yet another re-write??? Or do I just leave those bits in? (None of the betas queried them. Am I perfectionising too much?)
There is a certain joy and satisfaction to be had in revising. I was in a kind of trance with it today. I had my Oxford Concise next to me (not the Shorter this one, but my old, frayed, covers-fallen-off 1970s edition Concise) and my Roget's Thesaurus next to it, and I scribbled lines I wanted to use on post-its and kept notes of repeated words and phrases.
I've read this fic so often now I could possibly recite it in my dreams...
I have never spent as much time revising any fic. This is the seventh or so draft. It's been through four betas and 2 1/2 years of writes and re-writes.
Some bits read (to me) incredibly smoothly and needed hardly any revising. These are the bits I wrote most recently. No wonder, in a way but also interesting: how living with a text for so long will actually hone your style and oil the writing.
Some bits read more clunkily (to me), and they are inevitably those written very early on in the process (interestingly, not the ones written first). So now I'm thinking: egads, I thought this was the penultimate draft but do I need yet another re-write??? Or do I just leave those bits in? (None of the betas queried them. Am I perfectionising too much?)
There is a certain joy and satisfaction to be had in revising. I was in a kind of trance with it today. I had my Oxford Concise next to me (not the Shorter this one, but my old, frayed, covers-fallen-off 1970s edition Concise) and my Roget's Thesaurus next to it, and I scribbled lines I wanted to use on post-its and kept notes of repeated words and phrases.
I've read this fic so often now I could possibly recite it in my dreams...