I'm a writer who's been skulking around the periphery of the fandom for a few years now. Been looking to expand my, ah, sphere of influence from my starting post over on FA, so I am setting up shop over here as well. I have changed my moniker from over there, though, as I fucking hate 'kbob'--that was just a placeholder back when I didn't really intend to contribute much of anything at all... How times have changed.

For the most part, I am known as a macro/micro writer, though my predominant interest is in sketching out interesting characters and writing (what I hope to be) witty, clever dialogue. I view the whole large and/or small folks thing as more a means to and end of accomplishing that; an occasion or situation in which to involve the characters.

Releasing a work of art, whether it be writing, painting, sketches, whatever, is always hard. No matter how hard you work at a piece, there's always that nagging feeling that something somewhere could have gone better. You can learn and grow from that experience in some way and hopefully apply that to further works. But that piece is out there. No going back.

And yet we're constantly inundated with special editions and the like, versions of a piece that have been tinkered with in some way or another. Why watch the theatrical cut of Return of the King when you can endure another hour of material? Why view the OG Star Wars when you can see it complete with a bazillion more CGI extras filling the frames? "It's so dense; every single frame..." Did the creator not have their shit together enough to create their proper vision the first time around? Is it all some money-making ploy?

I'm not seeking to provide any answers to that. However, I will state some general opinions and how they relate to the FUCKING SELLOUT editions I am releasing here over the coming weeks or months.

Once something's out there, it's out there. No take-backs. Looking at you, George Lucas. But. if something can be supplemented by the creator for good reason without eliminating the original material, that's a different matter. And therein lies my justification for these so-called 'Author's Preferred Texts'.

With the last story arc featuring Tabitha, Roger, and all that cast of characters coming to a close, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about those stories. I may write more one-shot type things with various characters from that universe, but that will depend upon when good ideas crop up.

Looking back on those stories, it’s been a really wild ride, and one that has really helped me to grow as a writer, I think. But I can’t help but look back with regret on some aspects of it. The individual instalments were written on the fly, and the published pieces are essentially slightly polished first drafts. There are parts that came together well, but there are also pieces that read just like what they are: rough sketches.

Ordinarily, I prefer to leave something untouched once it’s up/’published’. It’s out there, and it should stay there like that. So keeping this in mind for myself, I will of course keep all of the original editions up on my FurAffinity gallery unmolested.

However, I’m giving myself an opportunity to go back and revisit these works with these new “author’s preferred text” type versions. In the new editions, the bulk of the edits fall into one of a few categories:

1) LAYOUT CHANGES: I reformatted the text to make it a lot more aesthetically pleasing. It looks a bit more 'professional' now.
2) BASIC EDITING/CLEAN-UP: I always go through at least twice to proof my stuff before I release it, but here and there some embarrassing spelling or grammar errors have slipped through the cracks. In a few cases, words or entire sentence fragments were somehow omitted. I have corrected all of these (fingers crossed). I have also changed the pronouns from 'furson', 'somefur', etc, etc to the more conventional 'person', 'someone', etc etc. In hindsight, I had no real rationale for these aesthetic changes and so have opted to swap to the normal pronouns and so forth.
3) CONTINUITY: The world I created wasn’t quite the same at the beginning as it turned out to be by Long, Cold Dark or later. For example, Warren is a CIA agent in Tabitha Crane before I stuck him and Guillam in the fabricated MX4. Some place names are also changed from beginning to end. For the sake of consistency, I have edited everything so that it is consistent with the “reality” of the later stories, as that was when I had things most figured out.

4) CONTENT: These edits are the most substantial, but probably the most infrequent. The original arc of the plot, dialogue, and so forth, are all completely intact. Here and there, though, I have added words, phrases, or sentences to help flesh things out. A number of these additions come from extant draft material or scraps that were abandoned or momentarily lost for one reason or another.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these updated and cleaned up editions!