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Every so often I am beset with this urge to rewrite the first two episodes of Unjust Depths.

I feel like "The Roar" and "Thassalid Trench" somehow feel less intentional to me now than they used to, but I want to interrogate why that is, and I'll interrogate it on my blog where I just constantly open air vent to all of my readers about how sad and confused and mentally ill I am all the time while not publishing more of the story that I am talking about and that also ostensibly, that they like, and that is why they are here. I do this kind of thing because maybe it will come in handy for you later somehow (?).

There is definitely a disconnection between what my writing is like now and what it is like in those two episodes, but that's not shocking. Those two episode and their constituent chapters existed, in some form, since 2019, just after or even slightly contemporaneous to my decision to quit writing The Solstice War. They "feel" more like my old work The Solstice War (an idea we will come back to) because they are largely still contemporaneous to it. I was still the woman who wrote The Solstice War back then. I had not yet become "the woman who writes Unjust Depths". Since the story's publication in 2020, I've had 4 years and close to two million more words to explore my modes and methods of expression. I've come to a lot of conclusions over the years, I've tried different things, I've structured chapters in very different ways. It was inevitable that Roar and Trench would be different from how I write now, because it's inevitable that if you're deeply embedded in your art, and your art reflects your world and expression, with enough time and distance they will not be *able to* look the same.

Some part of it is commercial writing thinking, which doesn't apply to me but we're all just still steeped in because if we're writing stuff we've probably googled some shit about publishing once in our lives at least. I think about whether those two chapters "sell" the story properly, whether they "drive retention" (if we want to verge into software lingo that I am also just steeped in as well). Do readers see the potential in my "formative" writing or they bounce off? Is there a way that these chapters can be restructured to "hook" readers in and express what is special about the story *now* rather than the context of its creation *back in 2020*? This is definitely part of my thought process when I think about rewriting it-- knowing where the story goes, and being a better writer now than I was before, am I better equipped to write an opening to the story that fits my current predilections?

This is not constructive thinking for a few reasons. The first and most glaring one is that I am generally against commercial thinking in other areas of my art. For example I've stopped "marketing" it and I do not "monetize" it. So to decommercialize it in other areas while still being obsessed with these commercial ideas of retention is silly. People will read the story or they won't. It is not a hardcover book at a book shop that needs to drive sales, it's a webnovel that's free online. It loses me money by existing. Generally more people read and like my writing than I ever thought possible already. While I would like to have more readers who enjoy the story, because I am writing to draw out emotional reactions, I am creating art. However, if I am not marketing the writing, and I am not monetizing it, then why embark on a project to optimize it for reader retention? It's not even finished! My writing exists. People who want it or need it will find it and cherish it. So "optimizing" the initial chapters is a pointless endeavor for this reason, but not this reason alone.

You see, I didn't just write those chapters mindlessly. That's something that I think now because of my anxieties and because of my growth as a writer and because of my neuroses about myself-- I struggle a lot with impostor syndrome and self-hatred. But anyway-- back then, I did have reasons for the decisions I made in those chapters. One reason is I wrote these chapters with the intention of being "more like The Solstice War." I wanted them to serve as a bridge between my old work, which had fans who liked it and who might've felt cheated or abandoned when I stopped writing that work-- and all of my new ideas in my outlines. Unjust Depths has a weird setting, and it has weird concepts, weird inspirations, and is interested in weird things. It's a weird story that synthesizes a lot of my very personal fixations, from history to the mechanisms and use of weapons to conspiracy esoterica. Unjust Depths was always intended to slowly lead readers to its most wild concepts, to "open up" in front of them, slowly escalating from something closer to my old work to something farther. So those two episodes do have an intention, they are written in a certain way and fit into a rhythm that the story has which would be *lost* if I rewrote those chapters to be messy and shocking and weird like the rest of the story becomes. They are not just optimizeable, fungible pieces that are interchangeable, they *make the story how it is* and fit into the arc of its storytelling. I *designed* them. I had a *purpose* for them.

So the second reason to not completely rewrite those two chapters is that they were written with a certain intention that is now just part of the story and how the story grows and develops. Many readers have experienced this and felt satisfied; many have even been able to reproduce my intention when describing the feeling of the work. Changing it is not just "optimizing" or "improving" the work it also actively risks making the work *less coherent* as a complete piece even if it would make the beginning a better "hook" for new readers.

And I think there is a third reason not to change it, which is that, I am not particularly *inspired* with new material to add, nor do I know how I would make it different from before. It's like the fucking Field again-- I think about this as a lofty thing that would bring some nebulous benefit, a thing that I could accomplish to prove myself in some way, but it is totally formless. It is an apparition of my own struggles with the rest of my work. It relates to my anxieties about "having fans"-- should I change myself to better suit the people who now admire me in some way? It is emblematic of my relationship to my own work-- forever skeptical of my own abilities and whether I am "qualified" to have been the person who wrote a free webnovel that trans women talk about at gay bars. It is emblematic of my relationship to myself-- is it possible to improve me? If I think enough about my past, if I obsess over it, if I completely analyze it and decrypt it and reassemble it I could see finally, the one place where there was something that could be tweaked to make the now better. To make me better. To make my work better. To make people like me more. To make it all worthwhile. To make the world better. All I have to do is think, think, think about the past and I will find it. I will find it and I will win.

Someday, maybe, I am open to the idea of returning to those Episodes and changing this or that. But not in this context.

Maybe there's something about moving forward with the mistakes you make, as unbearable as the past you may seem.

Maybe you had reasons back then even if you couldn't understand them now.