Also this mention of full service editing has made me wonder how common it is for fic authors to go back and routinely edit shit they've done. I know that I've gone back and like fixed bits and bobs in my poems before but those tend to be like smaller edits. Things like 'Oh this word choice would fix the meter' as opposed to 'AND NOW I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE STANZA TO THE GROUND'. Mostly because I feel it...weird to make Large Changes once a thing is out there. It's why with some of my poems I tend to be much pickier about when I release on my ao3 account. I'll post the rough drafts in places I consider to be less official than that but it won't go on the main account until I am like 'Yes. That is what I want it to be.' Which tends to mean sending it through multiple editing phases until I say fine fuck it it's done now. Then it gets posted and outside of like maybe I missed a typo it stays the way it is. But like. Are there authors out there that just edit entire chunks of shit at times. I've seen authors take things down and put out edited versions of works before but it seems rather rare. And I'm not sure if I've seen someone who just periodically changes bits of the originally posted work. How common is all this. I wonder. Because the nature of how fanfics are posted makes editing them after the fact very, very easy.
I'm not sure how common it is, but i've def seen fics that had a 'currently in rewrite!!!' warning at the top
personally i tend to not post my stuff if i'm not happy with it, but i also write for a niche audience of myself and three other people all of whom gets to see the thing beforehand
I don’t feel like it’s super rare to run into an author’s note that says that chapter 7 was rewritten because the author wasn’t happy with it or the story ended up going in a different direction than they thought?
I think in pretty much every fandom I go looking in, if there's fic a few years old and authors still active, I've seen some variation of "rewriting the first [x number of chapters], currently on chapter [y]" in a summary or two. So I do think that it's more common now to go back and rewrite stuff than necessarily pull it down and repost (though I see that too.) Sometimes it's because people don't want to give up the stats, because I see it most often on high kudos/high comment fics.
Anecdata: I mostly don't do big edits, but I'll sometimes look at a thing I wrote like 3 years ago and discover a typo has spontaneously manifested and remove it or tweak a minor bit of wording I've never liked. But when I want to majorly rewrite something, I usually end up throwing out everything I had and doing it from scratch, so that's a lot of work to put in unless I'm really dissatisfied and really inspired. Also, beta anecdata: When I ask someone to look at my work, I'm usually mostly looking for, in order, a) a general impression of "does this have the effect I want it to," b) someone else to see the thing so I feel like I'm actually making progress, and c) any secondary proofreading they feel like doing.
It depends with me. Some of the poems I do painstakingly edit, with some not being published until months after the first drafts were originally written. Most others I'll post after going through like typo correction and the initial editing that happens when I type up things from the manuscript. Other poems I will type up exactly as written and then post them. The latter two are mostly because I view the fanfic as like...a way of shotgunning attempts to get better. Or most of my poetry, really, since I'm very 'make 10,000 shitty pots' and my medium is prone to short pieces to such an extent that it's very easy to just do that in terms of time. I can't recall running into it but then memories are stupid things that often don't work too well. It was just a thought because I'd remembered that I occasionally go back and fix up typos that might have gotten passed up in early typo sweeps and was wondering like. If anyone ship of theseused their fanfics because it's very simple to do so. Granted the fandoms I tend to look for fic in tend to be much smaller and very niche. And even in larger fandoms I tend to be dealing with more niche ships. So it might also be due to like where I am looking for fic? Since little of the shit I read is hitting very high stats and tends to be very much of a 'six people and a houseplant' status.
I honestly have no idea how many things might be edited in other ways and places. With notes like that, it’s usually to let regular readers know they should reread chapter 7 so they’re not confused, then I assume just never removed, presumably because there’s not a huge incentive to update your author’s notes to reflect how much you no longer think most readers will be confused about chapter 7.
... On a completely different topic; if you have no idea how to appropriately manage inadvisable trouser-feelings by age 32, you probably shouldn’t be teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts to teenagers.
Yeah... I mean, it was a pretty bog standard hot-for-teacher setup, and I try not to begrudge people their id fantasies, but like, one would think that at least part of the attraction to the idea of an older, more experienced partner is that they don’t react to everything with the same emotional maturity and impulse control you’d expect from a 17-year-old. *edit-* Or possibly a 14-year-old. One who’s never had a crush before.
When I'm in the mood for hot for teacher shit it's that difference in maturity levels, yeah. My interests in it have changed a bit since I've become an adult but it's still the differences in maturity levels. I suppose I might have interests in like an emotionally immature adult in fic but that'd be less a kink thing? It'd be something that would not be in my hot for teacher shit. Like I like my hot for teacher to be dumb as fuck but it's got to be a certain kind of dumb. The kind of dumb where my teacher is like 'But I'm your teacher' and my shitty crimeboy is like 'That makes it better' before I get chastised for being a little shit. This thing described here does not sound like that.
(All’s I’m saying is, absent complicating variables that really should have come up in the narrative by now, “What is this feeeeeling?!??” is not a plausible reaction from someone who’s presumably had over a decade to get used to a post-puberty existence.)
maybe they're a soulless automaton that only recently began to have such feelings and somehow they only just now experienced pants feels??
see that would have been one of those complicating variables that I’d’ve liked to have had textually acknowledged by this stage of the narrative.
(No more of this hinting around. It’s 2019, people! All this soulless-automaton baiting is neither necessary nor cute.)
Not exactly a gripe but it is funny how all this fandoms fics in a multifandom exchange, which does not seem to require specific characters or whump, are extreme whump for one specific character. I don't even think its a case of only one person requesting for the fandom the fics are addressed to multiple ppl
