I know why you'd say this. Two months is a pretty big thing, especially in message board time. And it does feel a little unfair to those of your readers who are experiencing it as a serial rather than as a single contiguous work. The one-year mark's sneaking up for me on my project, and I'm inclined to say that I'm maybe halfway done.Retrograde01 wrote:Thanks for the support, guys. Scene IV will be out in the near future.
Everyone always says this, but two months is still unacceptable.Mirage_GSM wrote:Nice chapter.
You know I'll always take quality over quantity.
And it's true that the longer you go, the harder it gets to pick it back up. The more time has passed, the more discouraging it becomes to pick it back up. And if you let yourself, you'll start going back to look at the earlier chapters (especially if you're doing a continuity check) and deciding that they're terrible and need to be rewritten (or that the whole project was a bad idea to begin with).
So yes, deadlines are important.
On the other hand, your first posted version is what people are most likely to see and remember. Going back to edit things alter is all well and good, but it's not really a second chance. I'm not saying to withhold posting until it's perfect, though. There's a happy medium in all things, after all.
What I am saying is that rushed work is rather permanent. If you force yourself to get something, anything on paper in order to hit a deadline, you're probably doing it wrong. And once it goes live, people will read it and remember it. So a spur-of-the-moment decision could cost you significantly in terms of audience goodwill, and it's very hard to recover from that.
Also, it's one thing to say you're going to go back and fix something. It's much harder to actually do it when the time comes.
Again, this isn't to say delays are always a good thing or always justified. There are many, many problems on that side of things, too. I still strongly advocate writing to put something on paper, and toy around with different approaches if you seem stuck. But don't rush to go public in order to meet a deadline if you know it means you aren't giving your work the attention it deserves.
Deadlines are in fact a good thing. I strongly recommend them, even. But they're there to help get good work done. If the focus is too much on the "done" part and not enough on the "good," it will probably come back to bite you.
...this kind of discussion really needs a point/counterpoint format in order to show the benefits and problems with both sides of the issue...
