How often/to what extend do you edit published fanfic work?

[seitora]

Of late with my pony fics, I've been going into stuff that I've already published and doing a lot of editing beyond just grammar and spelling. I'm not specifically rewriting at all, but I've been adding in lots of new lines here and there, full paragraphs, and occasionally an entirely extra scene altogether.

I wouldn't really call myself a perfectionist but I've certainly been finding lots of things to add in. For example rereading my work several weeks or months after I've written it gives me a fresh perspective, since I can read something a character does, ask myself "Wait, why did she do that again?" and realise that it made sense to me before since I was the author, but from a reader's perspective it was missing something. A line or two fixes that.

Then sometimes I see an opportunity for a punchline I missed before, or the chance for foreshadowing, and so on.

So my question is: how much, if at all, do you edit stuff that you've already published and put out there?

 

[Glimmervoid]

I mostly edit for spelling and grammar. I have gone further, though. I completely replaced my old Harry Potter: Agents of MI6 fix with a new version a few years ago.

 

[PCHeintz72]

As a FYI... a lot of authors do not indicate content in prior or existing chapters have been changed to the readers... It would be a good idea if you do such things to your stories to not only either version number or date stamp each chapter, but to then note it in both summary and the changed chapter AND the content of the next chapter released...

All should be done as some use direct links to stories and not the normal method, thus bypassing the summary.

What I used to do was actually redownload in batches some active stories I read, and compare against my last downloaded copy, to see if differences... If you read my updates list thread, I was doing that for a while and noting the authors doing it. I'd find all kings of little changes that way.

Regrettably, the downloader I was using changed its multi-download option and makes it harder to do that. So it is not done as much in the last few months.

 

[balthanon]

I'll do it periodically to my own local copies of the stories as I read through them for one reason or another-- I very seldom go back and update versions that I posted to various forums, but if they're significant enough I'll go in and correct the versions at Fanfiction.net or AO3. I typically only note changes that have occurred if they are significant enough that readers might want to reread the chapter.

 

[PCHeintz72]

That is fine, though really it makes sense to keep them in sync...

What I dislike are the authors that *call* it editing and will edit a story on a archive, and cause it to float to the top of the list, and in the end it might be one or two words... and they will keep that pattern up for weeks or even months at a time... I know of one on MediaMiner that did that for years

 

[balthanon]

I don't think editing on Fanfiction.net triggers an update notice, does it? Same with AO3, though I'm not sure about that. (You can actually manually change update and publish dates there though, so it's kind of a moot point.) If it does, that is fairly shady though.

As far as keeping the stories in sync on the forums, a big driver for not doing that on my part is having to update individual parts when I post in chunks smaller than a chapter. It makes going back in with edits a bit of a pain. I figure if I have a link to the updated story that's generally sufficient.

 

[seitora]

Not to mention how different sites have different formatting. I've mostly given up on even trying to keep FFN formatting consistent, given that the site seems more ruthless on hunting down line dividers than Simon Wiesenthal was with Nazis.

 

[PCHeintz72]

While unlike MediaMiner an edit of a existing chapter will not move it to the top of the list in FanFiction.NET, it can depending on feed reader settings trigger a change in the feed, causing it to be highlighted as changed...

I know this because I monitor the RSS/ATOM feed system for authors on FanFiction.NET and use my own Favorites setup. I do not use either the author/story email alerts, nor do I use the internal favorites setup on the site.

However, that feed can also be updated by reviews being left. So I generally look at the date in the feed for the newest chapter, which will not be updated for a edit, just for additions/deletions.

 

[balthanon]

Not to mention how different sites have different formatting. I've mostly given up on even trying to keep FFN formatting consistent, given that the site seems more ruthless on hunting down line dividers than Simon Wiesenthal was with Nazis.

I pretty much find myself sticking with a simple ellipsis between minor scenes on FF.net.  Anything else I need to actually go into the source and replace with an <hr />.

 

[Yorae Rasante]

Since you can center text in FF.net I center my text and put five Is as division. But I try to avoid them.

 

[balthanon]

Doing a find and replace isn't too bad for inserting a horizontal rule, I just wish that the Rich Text editor would accept something so I could just use that in my text documents or do the find and replace there.