User blog:Atarumaster88/A Force Exile III FExplanation

For any of you who have been wondering what I've been up to (outside of my usual shenanigans and commenting on featured work nominations), I've been rewriting Force Exile III: Liberator. It's taken me the better part of a year to work on, given that I've been working on it since October. Let me explain.

I've previously done "rewrites" to Force Exile I: Fugitive and Force Exile II: Smuggler to bring them up closer to my current standards of writing. They were older works that showed my relative lack of skill as an author back then, and were not up to snuff. Nor had they ever been reviewed fully by my beta-reader. Fugitive suffered from a disjointed third act and Smuggler had a couple of particularly egregious scenes that needed rewritten. They both needed wording and dialogue fixes. I did both of those rewrites in 2012 while working on Force Exile VI: Prodigal&mdash;each one took me about four to five months to update.

So why did the Liberator rewrite take me nearly twice as long?

Because that book sucked. It sucked so hard that I even I hated to read it. The plot had a number of nearly superficial characters. There were quasi-spiritual/mystical elements that were cheesy and strained the inclusion of the story into the Star Wars universe. A lot of the prose was completely awful and entire plot arcs were basically extraneous. Numerous events felt forced rather than occurred naturally. The dialogue needed serious help, especially any sort of heavy emotional scene. The pacing was either too slow or breakneck fast.

I hate the current release of Liberator possibly more than I hate any other fan-fiction on this website. I've made vocal public statements to that effect. Why? Because I'm responsible for that atrocity, that insult to good writing that is Force Exile III: Liberator.

For the Force Exile I and Force Exile II reworks, I probably kept 75% of the original prose and rewrote/added less than 10% new content. FE I used to be ~58,500 words; now it's 57,000. FE II used to be 95,800 words long; now it's 95,400. If you read either novel before, they're still largely recognizable.

I couldn't do that for Force Exile III. There wasn't enough to salvage. This time, I probably rewrote 75% of the novel. There are entire major characters and plot arcs that didn't exist before, and others that were marginalized or deleted. The current Force Exile III: Liberator word count sits at 150,900. I just checked the new version, and prior to receiving more beta-reader feedback which might add a minor scene or result in other changes, I'm sitting at 195,300 words. The novel has grown considerably to be my second-longest work. And I'm okay with that. The length never bothered me. The quality of the story did, and in my opinion (and that of my beta-reader's), it's a lot better now.

That makes the last eight months of re-reading that old prose in disgust worth it. That makes all those late nights spent wondering how on earth I was ever going to resolve X convoluted plot element bearable. While it took a lot longer than I thought it would take, I'm just glad it's done.

I've sent the final segment of the novel to my beta. I still need to review and incorporate some other feedback and possibly shift some scenes around to make the timeline coherent, and then work on the article text. But the core writing of my last novel project is done, and after having hated this book for so long, it gives me great relief to say that. The full re-release should be sometime in April and will mark the end of work on the Force Exile novels.

To any of you who've read the current version of Force Exile III, you have my apologies. To anyone who's kept reading my work anyway, you have my thanks. Atarumaster88 ( Talk page ) 20:17, March 26, 2014 (UTC)