I’m gonna cold open this blog post by saying that editing is difficult and for those of you out there that do it for all of your works, hats off to you.

Have you ever been reading my work and seen a really obvious spelling mistake or continuity error, then wondered how I could possibly miss that? The answer is simple – I frankly do not edit. I used to, a ton, but then somewhere around the last 5 chapters of Being More Social I had a bit of an epiphany. I thought to myself that, as I mentioned, these stories were accounts of events that I was witnessing my imagination wax, as opposed to things I created myself intentionally. It suddenly seemed wrong to go back and change the wording. I came to really love the idea that the stories were my raw account of what I saw, untouched by secondary edits. (Panopticon wasn’t even read before I published it. So in case you thought that story was terrible, now you know why.)

At this point, I’m trying to put more effort into my patrons and their perks, so for the last little bit I’ve dedicated my free time to reading over and editing my work (hence why this blog post is a bit late). I can’t have others in my circles read it over, because I don’t want my friends to know I write about highschoolers diddling each other and having someone online edit my work without payment is tasteless, so I opt to do it myself. And it is difficult.

It makes a lot of sense in retrospect that I had a lot more free time when I was younger but still put out chapters at a snail’s pace, now that I’m timing myself with my edits and finding I’m very inefficient. Plus, it’s more than a quarter of a million words to go through. It’s also pretty nostalgic, considering it’s quite literally four years ago (time flies, doesn’t it?). There are a few things I’m kind of ashamed that I wrote, and now I’m at a werid tussle between ‘Can I change it now that I think differently?’ and ‘This is potentially what readers came for, changing it would be tampering.’ We’ll see what choice I end up going with.

These pieces will not be available on the website, by the way – these are going to $5 patrons. Because you still have access to the unedited version for free, to me this isn’t locking content behind a paywall – this is just making sure people get their money’s worth. Once I finish BMS and Panopticon’s polished versions, I’ll convert them to pdf format. From there on, any 5$ or more patron who has been charged at least once will get all of the completed polished pdfs so they don’t have to eat up data every time they want to read my works. I hope people enjoy them, and the other new piece I’m hoping to have out on this website by the end of April (fingers crossed). I’ll talk to you all later this week.