The editor is your friend
Jul. 6th, 2026 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](/%20https://www.npmjs.com/package/ocr-https-www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjones It occurred to me after the recent binge on Blake's 7 fanac that I should Do Something about getting more of my old zine-published fic online, this being a project that was brought to an abrupt halt a dozen years ago by one of the many unpleasant ways in which my body has failed me. So at the weekend I went looking for the old files, hoping that I would actually find them in a usable format because the earliest ones date back to Lotus AmiPro, never mind Lotus WorPro.
It turned out I did have the submission file of the very first fanfic I ever wrote, and it was a .txt file. I read it. I thought, "Why on earth didwatervole publish this?" The answer, of course, is that she didn't. The .txt file is what I initially sent her as a submission. What appeared in the zine is the version I sent her after she'd explained how to improve it.
Unfortunately I can't find the file for the published version (and will have to beg her to see if she still has it on an ancient machine or mailspool somewhere). And I am *not* going to put the first draft out in public. There is a reason why Dolphin Dreams is dedicated to her and to my editor at Loose Id, Raven McKnight. As I said there, editors are good people. They make your stories better.
It turned out I did have the submission file of the very first fanfic I ever wrote, and it was a .txt file. I read it. I thought, "Why on earth did
watervole publish this?" The answer, of course, is that she didn't. The .txt file is what I initially sent her as a submission. What appeared in the zine is the version I sent her after she'd explained how to improve it.Unfortunately I can't find the file for the published version (and will have to beg her to see if she still has it on an ancient machine or mailspool somewhere). And I am *not* going to put the first draft out in public. There is a reason why Dolphin Dreams is dedicated to her and to my editor at Loose Id, Raven McKnight. As I said there, editors are good people. They make your stories better.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-07 05:00 pm (UTC)It was always a pleasure to edit your stories. You were a fast learner!
(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-07 07:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-08 03:51 pm (UTC)Ah yes! A lot of fan writers are weak on descriptive text at first. They're so focused on the character dialogue, that they forget to 'show' us the setting.
I do remember one writer (who never did manage to produce anything I was willing to print) who always wrote 'story outlines'. They were usually about half a page long, and should have been a lot longer...
(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-09 09:56 pm (UTC)For me it's not even about fan writing, it's just that I'm not a very visual writer. More than one person has commented that I obviously hear my stories as a radio play rather than see them as a film. I learnt about aphantasia at some point in the last five years, and various things suddenly fell into place. :-) I'm not completely aphantasic, but definitely towards that end of the spectrum.
Relatedly, Anna Louise Genoese who was formerly an editor at Tor said if you file the serial numbers off fanfic you realistically need to double the story in length to put in the worldbuilding that could be assumed as background knowledge for the fanfic version. I found that with what ended up as Mindscan in the profic version - and that was with a story idea I would have written as profic to start with if there had been anywhere to sell it to at the time.
I remember the writer you mean, because I had the same problem with them. Explain how to fix something by using one example from the story, and it would come back with just that specific example fixed and all the other similar problems through the rest of the story untouched. At their worst they would toss off a one or two sentence story idea and expect someone else to actually write the story for them while they got the credit as author or co-author.