I realised I was ruminating on the only pieces of Cursed Witch feedback I remembered from the second round of beta-reader feedback, so I took a couple of hours to reread it all this morning. Now I have more points to ruminate on contemplate ;)
In general, I'm paying the price for early choices. Obviously, a couple of themes poked their nose out as I was planning-writing-rewriting this story, but the big question that drove my efforts from the start wasn't related to theme or story. It was: "Can I finish a novel-length story, including editing it?" A lot of decisions followed from that. The story is single PoV. The stakes are very personal, not epic/world-impacting. I didn't give a lot of space to the characters around the main two (although I believe that last rewrite helped with making most of them feel like they have their own lives and goals, too). I also ended the story as soon as I could find a decent stopping point, so it's a bit short for a novel. It means earlier events are not as well connected to later ones, or it's not obvious they will become relevant in the sequels. I also made the beginner mistake of keeping everything a mystery until close to the end, leading to Reveal Fatigue XD This improved a bit in the last rewrite (after the first round of beta feedback), but probably still not enough.
Should I accept that this was a learning project, cut my losses, and move on? Where does the sunk cost fallacy plays in vs what might just be lack of persistence or stamina? I'm also pondering what I wrote vs what I enjoy reading, since there's a couple of places with a mismatch.
I got so, so much helpful feedback though, and it's so cool and such an honour to see people thinking so deeply about my story. After rereading all the feedback, I feel more motivated to try to fix it rather than throw my hands in the air. It feels possible even if, as usual, it will be a Ton Of Work (tm) if I do. Also, it's interesting that none of the stuff I was still worried about by the end of the last edits came up (or just once as an aside), so getting an external perspective was very much needed.
( Massive navel-gazing about the story and the things I'm torn about, including, again, structural issues. This is long! )
In all honesty, before I re-read the feedback and started writing this post, I was sort of leaning toward a full rewrite. Now, I'm learning toward clearer early stakes, rejigging the order of reveals again, and perhaps ending the story later so the impact of the early events and characters we meet is clearer -- but that's going to be a huge rewrite too... so if I'm gonna put in the work anyway, should I change the story to bring it closer to my strengths?! (aka, more playful) But then, isn't it just telling a different story... Either way, I don't have the moral strength for that amount of rework just yet, so I'm just going to set it aside for a bit longer. I'm tempted to try the new way of doing structural edits method I used with ST on it, but even to do that I need to start with my goals for the story, so I need to be clear with myself what those are, first. These bullet points lead to very, very different paths.
Glad I did my feedback reread because it also helped remind me of the good bits! And I saw so many moments and sentences I like from rereading the inline feedback, too. On the other hand, that makes decision-making more difficult XD But also, writing this up helped me come up with the "episodic structure" insight. I was reading fewer novels and watching/reading more animanga when I planned and wrote (and rewrote) this story, and I think that influenced how I structured it more heavily than I realised. It still doesn't tell me what I want to do with this story next, but I'm finding the framing useful. Not sure "writing the rest of the season" is enough because it's still awkward in novel form, e.g. there's some repetitiveness (which was noted in the feedback. I was trying to vary it up to show the inescapability, but at a high-level it's the same scene in different flavours happening a lot I suppose). The setup is not connected to what will happen later as smoothly (in animanga, it's not uncommon for plot threads to be dropped for half a season (or longer!) while an arc focuses on some other problem or characters, but it's more confusing in novel format imo, at least the way I ended up doing it.) I still have a lot to think about. Though feel free to give me even more to think about, if something came to mind ;)
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rydra_wong
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