Ending Is Better Than Mending

I'm currently on another editing binge. It hasn't been pleasant.

I have a few pairings that I love and never get tired of, and every once in a while I'll go onto the appropriate tag on AO3 and read everything. This means that I end up reading my own fic in the context of all the other work that's been posted.

This can be embarrassing, especially in the Final Fantasy fandom. The stories those nerds write are amazing, while the ones I've written are shamefully awful need work.

All things considered, I'm not a bad writer. When it comes to fiction, however, I'm entirely self-taught, and my earlier stories had two major problems. The first was that I didn't know how to edit. (To be fair, I still don't, but I'm learning.) The second was that I used to have trouble writing if I wasn't drinking. I always wanted to write fiction, but I felt like I couldn't because of Reasons. I kept at it and found my way around that particular mental blockage, but the toll on the quality of my writing was high. Everyone who ever left a kudo on one of my stories is a motherfucking saint.

I'm going back to my old fic and trying to patch things up, but it's painful. I'm tempted to give up and delete everything.