Author's Note

NOTE: You may safely disregard the 'incomplete' tag if you're the kind of reader who doesn't want to commit to starting a story before it's done being written. The story is complete with all chapters written (they had to be for me to print the book, after all), I'm just releasing them one a day or so over time.

You can skip to the first chapter here: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/568949/3/seashell-print-rewrite/excerpt-i

Preface

SEASHELL

Preface
From the desk of the author, March 12, CE 2024:

This story is going to be ten years old by the time it will have reached print. A version of it is that old, anyway. If you’ve read this story before on FimFiction.net, that’s the one you read.

I decided it was not the version I wanted to print.

To explain briefly: this story was worth rewriting ten years on because I think the parts at its heart and core are still important enough to be worth writing about, but how it was told needed to change. To quote someone more famous than myself without asking their permission, but at least in what I think is a largely non-harmful and properly acknowledged way, I think Neil Gaiman said it best:

“When people ask if I'd change anything about a book I've already written, I want to explain to them that I'm not the person who wrote that book any longer, and even if I tried right now I'd write a different one. Everything you make as a writer* is a combination of what you want to say and who you are at the time you are telling that story.
*possibly also as an artist or as a human being”

That’s really the crux of it right there. Stories are always products of the author’s circumstances and experiences, and a lot changes in ten years. Some things are universal, and those parts of the story never change. But certain approaches to the details? About the way the story is told, depending on the teller?

Those change.

Those change a lot.

Looking back at what I wrote ten years ago, I knew I couldn’t just print it verbatim today. It wasn’t me anymore, not with a decade of hindsight and (I hope) growth as a writer. There were parts in the old version that were, as the kids say, cringe. I changed those. There were also some parts which read as being edgy-for-the-sake-of-edgy, and I didn’t think things like that really fit or helped the story, so those went too. There was more I wanted to see in a few of the things that the old version doesn’t cover, so I added them.

And so the changes went. Before I knew it, it was more of a remake or a rewrite than a mere edition or revision. It turned out that when I asked myself what I’d change, the answer was, as Neil said, I wouldn’t just change it—I’d write a different book.

But don’t worry: in the ways I think matter, it’s the same story. You just get to read it in a different telling, now. Personally, I think this is the better version. The last ten years of watching people experience the old version was something I enjoyed greatly, but I had to reckon with the fact that it’s something from the past, whose time has come and gone. Now I look forward to finding out what this new one brings to the table, and what the next ten years of writing that starts with this will look like. Thanks for being part of that process by reading this new print version of an old favorite.
 
 
I think that’s enough about change for today.