#the thing is I'm certainly a perfectionist to a degree when writing

[inkblackorchid]

With the next one of Aki’s stories being a long one, is it something you are planning on finishing before you start publishing chapters, or publishing as you go along? Just curious what your approach is for the longer fics

Ok so as I've said on tumblr (and I think maybe also in the author's notes on ao3?? I forget) before, I at the very least want to finish the first portion of this fic before I start uploading anything. (That portion's end being marked by a particular duel.) From the way my outline is looking right now, that means I'd probably write until chapter 5 or more before I might consider publishing a chapter (there are currently a total of 14 chapters planned). And as of right now, I'm about to finish the first draft of chapter 3.

...But. But. See, the thing is, this fic, due to being extremely plot-heavy, needs to be super tightly written. Like, this thing needs to work. And all the duels in it (yes, multiple) really need to hit the mark, or else this story loses some of its emotional impact. In other words, I'll definitely be extra thorough when it comes to editing this one, too. So at least where this particular fic is concerned, I'm kinda shying away from the "publish as I go along"-approach, because there are too many moving parts here and I want this to be as coherent as possible. So it's a bit of a tossup atm. If I feel confident enough in how fast I'm progressing with the story by the time that first portion is written out, I may start publishing before all the chapters are done. But if there's a chance that I might deviate from the outline later in a way that would require me to go back to a previous chapter to add some setup there? I'll hold off and wait until at the very least the first draft of the whole story is done.

As far as longer fics in general go, though, I'm always more the type who likes to write a bit in advance before publishing. Even with To Be of Use, which had little to no plot and was the only work I've genuinely published as the chapters got done so far, I didn't feel entirely happy throwing the chapters out as I had them. I'm a huge fan of setup and payoff, and callbacks, and foreshadowing, etc. and the thing is, even if you're a very practiced writer, as soon as you're writing a plot-heavy story, you'll encounter moments where you come up with an important thing you want to happen a little later in the story than you meant to, and suddenly need to go back to actually set that up, because you didn't in the first draft of an earlier chapter. (At least this is my experience, your mileage may vary, writing styles differ, etc.) So to write the best thing I can, I usually like to give myself the time to write the entire first draft, then revise that first draft, then do the final edit of each chapter just before publishing it. (This was also my modus operandi for basically all my 5Ds fics prior to Fields of Arcadia. Even if I didn't have the entire story edited and polished yet, the first draft was always complete before I ever started publishing. It's only now that my backlog of pre-written first drafts has caught up to me and I'm forced to keep y'all waiting as I prepare the next big thing completely from scratch in real time.)