doing a reread of spirit hat bc finally feeling the motivation to work on it again, but i equally feel the need to reread it to make sure i'm remembering details correctly bc it's been SO LONG, and it's just amusing the heck out of me to get to certain points and know exactly where certain things were changed or even entire chapters deleted. there's also the level of "how much i planned out from the beginning" vs "how much was added in later."
( more rambling here )and then the other part of rereading pt1 is seeing everything that i was setting up that i haven't even gotten to write yet, but that
i've been dying to, and getting all motivated to continue writing.
got so hung up on and frustrated with doing rewrites for so long that it just really compounded the burnout i was feeling and the stress i was under from irl shit that i just had to shove everything to the side. which is, honestly speaking, probably for the best. was getting to where i hated even thinking about the fic for a while there, like it started feeling like a job, not a hobby, and that's exactly the opposite way i want to feel about fiction writing.
it is very genuinely frustrating to have basically the whole of pt4 technically written, but being unable to post any of it bc so much of it needs to be rewritten, in some cases for the third or fourth time (aaaaaaa!!!!!!!!). slowly being backstabbed by my own perfectionism over and over and unable to do anything but sit there all: "okay :-("
and focusing on getting to the parts i'm dying to write doesn't help bc it's just a reminder that i'm not writing it lmfao.
like only lightmode knows how many times i rewrote what i've been calling the shed chapter (the "ethan gets drunk and they make out on the porch" chapter). and i think it's infinitely better for it but by the end i was so fucking sick of it. nothing was working for me 100% and i
needed that chapter to work 100%. it was goddamn
imperative that it work 100%. not even for like. the success of the narrative, i just needed it to be perfect bc i guess i'll die if things i make aren't perfect? idk.
anyway, enough time has passed now that i'm not feeling the burnout as much and i feel like i actually
want to write again. to specifically write spirit hat again. gotta get thru pt2 and ethan's castle explorin' first tho (not a big fan of that section tbh; would prob rewrite it if i was editing pt2 rn). there's stuff that got axed from pt2 too; not bc i misremembered something from the game, just because it fucking sucked lmao. no one knows what bullet we all collectively dodged, but we should all be glad to have dodged it lol.
(oh, except for the part where i was going to have karl find the karl book when they got to the winterses' house and things were going to go Very Poorly bc no telepathy yet and ethan was going to end up impaled and it was going to be So Fraught, and then i was like "nah they spent most of this fic fighting, the karl book discovery can be moved to later." but like initially was really gonna lean into the enemies to lovers thing, was gonna need to For Real Tho the dubcon tag, and then i was just like nah bc i was tired of writing them fighting. also bc i wanted to add in fake married bc i knew lightmode enjoyed the trope. the ways lightmode has unknowingly shaped the fic: fake married. the ways lightmode has knowingly shaped the fic: i asked them what they wanted to see and they said karl in a hawaiian shirt on the beach. i mean also all their edits/suggestions lmao, but here specifically i am referring to Unforeseen Plot Divergences.)
just rambling at this point. a lot of this is stuff i've wanted to talk about for a while, but twitter isn't exactly the best place for it, and then i also figure that this is all a "no one cares" sitch. but thankfully i've remembered my dreamwidth exists: my personal internet word vomit space, hell yeah i'll holler into the void.
anyway back to the reread. here's hoping i can finish soon and actually get to some writing!