wherein Liz continues her edits

[edenfalling]

I am continuing to edit my way through "The Guardian in Spite of Herself," and am posting one chapter a day over on AO3 until I catch up to myself. So that version is now complete through ch. 11, and I am in the process of overhauling ch. 13.

Ah, ch. 13.

I confess, there is a brief moment in ch. 13 that is the main reason I wanted to do an overhaul in the first place, because I got an ff.net review pointing out the problem with that moment back in March 2014, whereupon I looked at the paragraph in question and said, "Oh shit, you're right. What the actual fuck was I thinking?" Then I figured as long as that needed fixing, I might as well fix some other things that had been bugging me slightly (aka, all the punctuation), and then I figured I might as well roll all that into a 'rework the whole story en route to finishing the next chapter' project, and you can see how quickly THAT happened. *sigh*

There have been a few other lines and paragraphs that I looked at seriously askance upon rereading, which I have duly altered or removed altogether, but this one is the biggie. And I'm not quite sure what to replace it with. I can't simply yank it out and be done, because there's a narrative and character beat that has to hit at that point. But it cannot be that particular beat, because ugh, no.

Seriously, what the fuck was I thinking? Or actually, was I thinking at all? I suspect I wasn't especially, and that's what caused the problem.

It's creepy how cultural conditioning seeps into people's subconscious minds and then seeps back out into our own stories when we're not paying attention, you know?

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ETA: It looked much more solvable in the morning, as such things often do. :-)

Comments

[marmota_b]

I know. It's why I like this way of publishing, though... as a sort of conversation with the readers, if I do get feedback.

[edenfalling]

Yes, the feedback and conversation/community are aspects of writing fanfiction that I adore. :-)

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

Which part in Chapter 13 made you want to redo the story, out of curiosity?

[edenfalling]

The bit where Yukiko wildly overreacts to Seichi using a mildly disparaging nickname for Naruto ("fox brat"), and threatens to tell the rest of the caravan that he tried to drunkenly rape her if he ever does that again.

Which, uh. No.

I suspect I wrote that as a really clumsy attempt to show that Yukiko is extremely stressed out because of A) the moral weight of an assassination mission and B) the unexpected complication of having Naruto and Sasuke along. But the issues surrounding false rape accusations are not a pool of sharks that I want to jump into, and rather than spend several hundred words to make Yukiko to realize the problems with her words in-text, I am just unhappening that line.

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes sense, I didn't remember that exchange. Maybe you can come up with another way to convey the same information about how stressed Yukiko is?

[edenfalling]

I left the threat at 'make your life a living hell,' method unspecified. In replacement, I put in a couple narrative lines about Yukiko carefully suppressing various stress reactions, and also tweaked the bit where Sasuke tries to argue that she's not the boss of him to point out that she did let him derail her at first, which she normally would not have fallen for.

[wistfulmemory.livejournal.com]

It's never fun going through and figuring out how to change those parts, but I'm glad you were able to find a solution.

[edenfalling]

Me too!