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"I've Invented Lutherins!"
Dec. 23rd, 2009 11:55 amAbout seven months ago now I stopped writing Taking Sights in favor of starting on a AtLA plot bunny that wouldn't leave me alone. In those six months I've written about 130,000 words for Facing Fearful Odds. In that same span of time I've written -- maybe -- eight hundred works of Taking Sights. So with the New Year coming up I thought it'd be nice to post a new chapter for Taking Sights as a belated Christmas present.
To get back in the spirit of Taking Sights, I re-read what I have for the ten remaining chapters. It's horrifying. It's like the story is a carton of takeout that I've left undisturbed in a dark fridge for six months and now the mold's taken over the whole damn thing. There's 4,825 words written so far for the next chapter of Taking Sights, all of it six months old. And it's terrible. I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it.
I've written in the past that a big reason why each chapter of Taking Sights started taking longer and longer to write was because the basic story had been badly formed. The central conflict, the Gendo/Shinji relationship, was resolved too early on, forcing me to rely on Asuka for drama. I knew that six months ago. The problem seems even worse now. It's a terribly unbalanced fic, mostly so because I didn't beta it. A good beta can save you from making horrible mistakes -- I'll tell you about the nightmare of rewriting Chapter 5-A of FFO once it's properly posted -- and I just didn't have one for the early Taking Sights chapters. It shows.
So there will be no New Years update for Taking Sights. I've got to do some serious thinking about how to rework the dangling plot threads into something coherent and I can't do that while also focusing on Facing Fearful Odds. Once FFO is out of the way, I'll figure out a solution to this mess.
To get back in the spirit of Taking Sights, I re-read what I have for the ten remaining chapters. It's horrifying. It's like the story is a carton of takeout that I've left undisturbed in a dark fridge for six months and now the mold's taken over the whole damn thing. There's 4,825 words written so far for the next chapter of Taking Sights, all of it six months old. And it's terrible. I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it.
I've written in the past that a big reason why each chapter of Taking Sights started taking longer and longer to write was because the basic story had been badly formed. The central conflict, the Gendo/Shinji relationship, was resolved too early on, forcing me to rely on Asuka for drama. I knew that six months ago. The problem seems even worse now. It's a terribly unbalanced fic, mostly so because I didn't beta it. A good beta can save you from making horrible mistakes -- I'll tell you about the nightmare of rewriting Chapter 5-A of FFO once it's properly posted -- and I just didn't have one for the early Taking Sights chapters. It shows.
So there will be no New Years update for Taking Sights. I've got to do some serious thinking about how to rework the dangling plot threads into something coherent and I can't do that while also focusing on Facing Fearful Odds. Once FFO is out of the way, I'll figure out a solution to this mess.
