Wednesday 23 April 2014

Dancing with the Octo-Hoff

We're cheek to cheek at this stage, me and the Octo-Hoff. I'm seven stories deep at the moment. That's where we're at at this stage. That feels like too many, but I am trying to put some to bed. That is a process that I am coming to terms with.

For a very long time I made excuses as to why I would never actually finish stories. Lots of reasons. Some were more common than others, but the really persistent ones were kind of weird. I'm not really going to go into that now, because that is a much larger story for another day. This is an update: A progress report.

There is one thing that I have learnt, though, that helps a great deal. Something that i have observed, and also something that has been verbally thrust upon me by others that I deem important enough to repeat here.

When it comes to the written word, no author is ever forced to definitively say that they are finished with anything, and/or that whatever draft currently exists publicly of anything is going to be the last. Not until you die. That is what death is for. When you die all of your words stop, but until then you can revisit anything.

This isn't new either. This isn't something that is accommodated only by the technologies of the brand new 21C. Philip K. Dick reworked 'The Unteleported Man' into Lies Inc., Raymond E. Feist amended the pants off Magician, and Herge adjusted many of the early Tin Tin comics to better suit the collected format, and then again to more closely match his changing concepts of race.

If you write a story, and you think you might want to change it later, you can do that. That is a rule.

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