Rynling R&D

As I continue to distance myself from Tumblr, I've been working on editing the short essays I've posted on a video game blog that I started about a year ago on Wordpress. I'm fully aware that this is a narcissistic thing to say about myself, but I'm impressed by the quality of my writing.

The posts I'm having to put through the most substantial edits are about the Zelda games. Although my writing is fairly intelligible, when I talk about Zelda I tend to lapse into Tumblrese, which can come off as incredibly strange when it's encountered out of context. If I had to guess, I'd say that I was doing this as a defensive strategy to disguise just how much I love the Zelda games, like, Haha I'm writing like an asshole because I'm not taking this seriously. I don't think anyone is fooled, though.

As I move forward, I'm going to need to work on developing my tone. I want to come off as informed and authoritative, but also chill enough that there's still room in my writing for passages like this:

Lenzo's sidequest is a more contained version of the larger quest given to Link by the King of Red Lions. It's also a kinder and gentler version, almost like a window into a parallel universe in which Link isn't persuaded into embarking on a crazy epic murderquest by a talking boat.

I've also started to edit my published fic again. There's really no point to this, and I don't think it's helping me improve as a writer, but I want to leave behind a pretty corpse.

Still going through old stuff, still finding mistakes.

The Zelgan Big Bang fic has seven obvious typos, about a dozen redundancies, one minor formatting error, and one major formatting error. In my defense, the formatting errors are not my fault. To my chagrin, all the other errors are.

Meanwhile, A Game of Castles must be procedurally generating typos, because I have no idea where they're all coming from. This is the fifth or sixth time I'm editing that fucking story.

I remember reading somewhere that imperfections are like a signature, a proof of individuality and personhood. I get that, but I also suspect there are very few people on this planet who care more about their writing being clean and error-free than I do. Why can't my signature writing style be not having any mistakes whatsoever?

When I mentioned "the fic that gets an inordinate number of readers" in an earlier post, I was referring to Bowser and Peach: A Love Story. Because I serialized it at the height of interest in FFN, it got a lot of traffic, and it's currently indexed very high on Google.

This story is my first fic, and I feel bad for the version of myself who wrote it. She was so innocent, and she had no idea what the fuck she was doing. I've since gone back and edited it twice. The first time was to find and correct typos, and the second was to delete every instance of the female lead crying or being unnecessarily stupid.

The story is still a mess, however, and hurts me to look at it. It's like a train wreck, with cargo exploding into flame and passengers and livestock attempting to flee. Do I try to save the people and put out the fire, or do I just let it burn like the magnificent spectacle of failure that it is?

I've been content to avert my eyes in favor of other projects, but this ridiculous story still gets over a hundred hits a day, so it's probably time to roll up my sleeves and wade in.

Meanwhile, I'm still fixing small typos and wooden dialog in A Game of Castles. Despite my general incompetence as a writer and editor, people seem to be reading that story too (atthough it's been more or less ignored on AO3 and Tumblr). According to the statistics gathered by FFN, something like two to three dozen people are reading the entire story every day. This makes me wonder where all these silent readers are coming from. I suppose I'll never know. I'm assuming that a portion of the "readers" are spambots, but that's okay; it would make me happy if the nascent singularity ships Peach and Bowser too.

I got three notes on the Tumblr post of the new chapter. Granted, all three notes are good notes from good people, but I still cried. Like, a lot. Like, all day long.

I'm still extremely distraught. I'd like to be melodramatic and say something to the effect of "I am a garbage person who only produces shit work and I should just give up," but the truth is that I write compulsively and probably couldn't stop even if I wanted to. If I'm going to keep at this, though, I need to do it in a way that gets more positive attention and doesn't result in me feeling like a poor misunderstood tragic artist.

This is what failure has taught me.

• Sometimes writing is magic, but mostly it's work. You need deadlines and a schedule.
• You need to update frequently and on a fixed timeline. Once a week is good.
• Never post anything in the morning. Tumblr primetime is after 5:00pm.
• The best time to post anything is in the late afternoon or early evening on Sunday.
• 2,500 word chapters are ideal. If a chapter gets much longer than that, split it.
• No one wants to read The Next Great American Novel. Content is important, not style.
• Keep editing the first few chapters as you go along. They need to be perfect.
• Be active and supportive within the fandom, but don't expect anyone to help you.
• Always respond to AO3 comments immediately, and reblog people's comments on Tumblr.
• Commission artists to illustrate your story. There is no better advertisement.

This week, as I've been finishing up the Zelda/Ganondorf novel, I've also been going through all the fic I've posted during the past twelve months (since November 2014) and line-editing it. The process itself is unpleasant, and it's even more unpleasant to be confronted with all of my typos and inconsistencies.

The older stuff (written before May 2015) has one typo for every 500 words. The newer stuff is much cleaner, but also much longer.

Also, because I have a constant powerful hunger for Bowser/Peach, and because most other people write that pairing as either insipid fluff or violent rape, I ended up re-reading my own stories. I've been editing them on and off for years, but I was still in line-editing mode and caught a few typos. How embarrassing.

The most frustrating part of all of this is that I'm not careless. I generally work on a story for at least a week, and I always let it sit for a day or two before I post it. I constantly edit a story as I'm working on it, and by the time I post anything it's already gone through several readings and revisions. So how are there still typos?

It may be that I'm mildly dyslexic, but I think it's more likely the case that I read and write so much both for work and for pleasure that I'm no longer acutely attuned to every single word I encounter or produce. It's like breathing – unless something really smells, I'm probably not going to notice a tiny bit of pollution in the air.

These typos may also be a result of my tendency to make stylistic and plot-related edits during what should be the final proofing, meaning that I don't always re-read the last batch of edits. There's nothing to be done about this save to hold off on posting something for a few more days, but by the time I'm on the last stage of proofreading I'm usually so sick of something that I just want it out of my hands.

The obvious solution would be to find a beta reader. I've given it serious thought, and in fact I've been courting (for want of a better word) someone on Tumblr because I admire her work and think it would be cool to become friends with her. We're now mutuals, which is nice, but I still don't feel comfortable asking her to beta for me. Even if I did, I probably wouldn't, because I'm not overly committed to "fandom" as a way of spending my time. Who knows, it's entirely possible that I'll change my mind, but that will either take time or a major catalyst.

In the meantime, I need to figure out a better solution for quality control.

Me going back to a fic I posted last October:



I had been putting off editing it because I knew it was a trainwreck; and now, seven months later, it's like opening a door on some sort of terrible crime scene. I'm like, what sort of person would even do this?