hmpf

Since I mentioned Epilogue here in my previous entry, I decided to have a look at it and see if it could be rendered postable.

Of course, I immediately felt compelled to edit it - down to 1300 words from the previous 1800.

Then, a vague memory stirred. I went through my LJ tags, and found this.

So. Apparently this story has been through this before. Although this time the reduction rate is even higher - and I started not with the original version but with the already-reduced version!

I should probably post this thing sometime soon, before I edit it down to zero. :D

I just cut about a fifth of "Epilogue", my ancient Highlander badfic (from 2170 words down to 1775). It's much improved now, I think - though it still needs more work. But it certainly is considerably less purple now.

I'll probably post a before-and-after here sometime, to illustrate the need for self-editing I described in my previous entry. (For the morbidly curious, of course, the old, unimproved version is currently still up on fanfiction.net, which tends to have older versions of my fic because I'm too lazy to keep it up to date.)

ETA: Interesting. It seems I already did this once, four years ago. I even ended up with a nearly identical reduction rate of about 20% (although, mysteriously, the story I started out with seems to have been shorter by about fifty words). I even tagged the relevant entry in my LJ 'machete', just like I did today. I have no idea where the improved version of the story that I created back then is.

ETA2: It seems that déjà vue/déjà écrit really is the theme of the day...