Aros

So I got SOME writing done at the beginning of the month, but not much, and March was similarly unproductive. For the last, hm, two, two and a half weeks, I've been trying to figure out why, and I think I've nailed down the problematic thought process.

See, I know that I'm planning on swapping which of Riku's parents is related to Kakashi, and that means rewriting the first chapter and revising some of the later ones. (Basically, the dad plotline I had planned almost doesn't change at all, but now I get to involve Riku's mom in at least the aftermath of some of the ninja shenanigans; the tradeoff is that everything that was built around Riku's formerly-ninja parent being the one who took off now needs redoing.)

And now my brain is insisting a) I can't write any of the later chapters until I have FIXED THE EARLY ONES (...almost certainly not true), and also b) fixing them is a MASSIVE undertaking and will take forever, certainly longer than I have right now (again, untrue, and also, writing is not accomplished in a day, I don't need it ALL done in one fell swoop).

Now that I have laid it all out like that, it sounds very silly and I think I'm just gonna go back to writing the Chuunin Exams. (I'm almost certain what kicked this off was my own reservations about how I was writing Riku at the start of this story, which is fair but also an entirely different problem. Revising the early fic chapters MAY help me nail down characterization, but right now, it's just enabling procrastination. So fuck that.)

So now that I have, for the first time in my life, finished a multi-chapter fic, I am now a) working on the sequel and b) thinking about revising the original. Becoming Ninja was very much a work-in-progress at all points, not just because I hadn't finished writing it, but also because I hadn't really thought through and polished all of the ideas. Also, some of the writing was...less polished. I haven't looked at the earliest chapters yet, but the only word processor I was using up until, god, halfway through? Was Google Docs. Which. Uh. Yeah. I read through the chapters, of course, but the story is unbeta'd and I didn't have the ending nailed down until about chapter 11-12.

Basically, this is the point where I'm looking at the story and thinking about Big Picture Revisions, in addition to little things like cleaning up the prose.

This post is intended to be a masterpost for things that I plan to/do change, so that I can link back so previous readers don't hit a line and go "wtf???" For the most part, I'm going to break revisions down into 3 categories: Clean-Up, which means I've gone through the chapter and fixed any errors -- there might be minor adjustments to lines, up to paragraphs added or taken out, but nothing major; Plot-Relevant Changes, which would encompass things like adding, removing, or moving around scenes, making adjustments to characters' backstories, motivations, or actions, changing who knows what when, etc.; and Pacing, which is basically my catch-all for "I combined/added/eliminated these scenes or chapters in order to build/maintain momentum."

Ultimately, Clean-up revisions will almost certainly be posted to AO3 as soon as the chapter is complete, with Plot-Relevant Changes made along the way; Pacing changes are potentially large enough that I'll probably hold off on putting them on AO3 until I'm done, because if I wind up doing something like taking out a chapter, I don't want to lose or mess up the comments posted on it. If I wind up doing a LOT of that, I think I might just post the whole, revised story as a separate work, and preserve the comments on the original as a separate piece.

( Clean-Up )

( Plot-Relevant Changes )

( Pacing )