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In a fit of productivity, tonight I coded all the italics and posted the entirety of "The Way of the Apartment Manager" to AO3, two chapters at a time.
The Way of the Apartment Manager: Ayakawa Yukiko retired from being a ninja, and she's come to terms with that. Then the Third Hokage summons her for an assignment that will change her life. AU story, set six years pre-manga. (72,000 words)
I was interested to discover that AO3 thinks the story is about 2,000 words shorter than my own previous estimate of 74,000 words. This is doubtless because I cannot make MSWord stop counting dashes as text, so every time I break a sentence -- like so -- or use a line of dashes as a scene break, I add phantom words to the document. Whatever wordcount system AO3 uses does know to ignore dashes, and thus produces a more accurate count.
I didn't edit the story the way I did with "Secrets" this past summer, though it suffers from the same idiosyncratic punctuation choices I was fond of back in 2002-2006. I also didn't edit for content. "Apartment Manager" is not a perfect story, but it was written in less than a year rather than under ridiculously drawn-out conditions, and as such is very much a snapshot of my writing ability at a certain time. I was okay with tweaking "Secrets" to reflect some of my changed habits, since I was still working on the blasted novel up until this past July, but it would feel vaguely dishonest to make similar tweaks to "Apartment Manager."
This does mean there are a few points that read oddly in light of some later material -- for instance, the bit about no roads leading away from hidden villages, which I had to heavily qualify in "Guardian;" Yukiko's thought that it'll be weird for her cousin Yuichiro to be responsible for a kid even though they jointly babysat his younger siblings through much of their childhoods; and the way Yukiko talks about being bad at ninjutsu rather than about having a chakra coil disability -- but I am willing to let them stand as is. Such are the risks of serial writing.
(Also, I may find certain aspects of the story a little silly and/or awkward in retrospect, but clearly it spoke and speaks to a lot of people... and if it ain't broke, I'm not going to try fixing it. *wry*)
The Way of the Apartment Manager: Ayakawa Yukiko retired from being a ninja, and she's come to terms with that. Then the Third Hokage summons her for an assignment that will change her life. AU story, set six years pre-manga. (72,000 words)
I was interested to discover that AO3 thinks the story is about 2,000 words shorter than my own previous estimate of 74,000 words. This is doubtless because I cannot make MSWord stop counting dashes as text, so every time I break a sentence -- like so -- or use a line of dashes as a scene break, I add phantom words to the document. Whatever wordcount system AO3 uses does know to ignore dashes, and thus produces a more accurate count.
I didn't edit the story the way I did with "Secrets" this past summer, though it suffers from the same idiosyncratic punctuation choices I was fond of back in 2002-2006. I also didn't edit for content. "Apartment Manager" is not a perfect story, but it was written in less than a year rather than under ridiculously drawn-out conditions, and as such is very much a snapshot of my writing ability at a certain time. I was okay with tweaking "Secrets" to reflect some of my changed habits, since I was still working on the blasted novel up until this past July, but it would feel vaguely dishonest to make similar tweaks to "Apartment Manager."
This does mean there are a few points that read oddly in light of some later material -- for instance, the bit about no roads leading away from hidden villages, which I had to heavily qualify in "Guardian;" Yukiko's thought that it'll be weird for her cousin Yuichiro to be responsible for a kid even though they jointly babysat his younger siblings through much of their childhoods; and the way Yukiko talks about being bad at ninjutsu rather than about having a chakra coil disability -- but I am willing to let them stand as is. Such are the risks of serial writing.
(Also, I may find certain aspects of the story a little silly and/or awkward in retrospect, but clearly it spoke and speaks to a lot of people... and if it ain't broke, I'm not going to try fixing it. *wry*)
