hedda62 | January posting meme: rereading own work (Reply)

pendrecarc asked: Do you ever reread your own work? Why, and what is it like?

My first reaction is to say, "What? Yes! Doesn't everybody?" but I suppose, as usual, it depends. I'm assuming that "reread" here refers to after publication/posting, as opposed to the approximately five billion times I've read through Time for Tea for editing purposes and the proportionally fewer but still significant number of editing passes that fic gets. But, after I'm done and it's out there: well, I haven't picked up my print copy of TFT and read that, because I am sick to death of it and I'm afraid I'll discover more typos (I do, however, need to do a reread for typo-discovery purposes at some point). I suspect this will be the pattern for the novels as they come out, because really, all those words? I am done with them. Though possibly I will peek at favorite bits, and certainly there will be cross-checking to be done as I refer back to things later in the series.

Fanfic, on the other hand, I do reread, and I think this makes sense, because most of it is self-indulgent and, much as other people may enjoy it, I write it for me. Usually the pattern goes: read again immediately after posting, because that's when the errors I missed in editing make themselves apparent; read a few times more in the next few days, especially if it's a story I really like and I'm getting a good reaction from readers; then leave it alone for a while. And then I may reread it on impulse down the line when I'm in the mood, or when someone new discovers it and leaves a comment (that's the "what were they reacting to?" read, when either I want to experience that again for myself or I honestly don't remember).

This pattern varies a lot by the fic. I recently reread "Further Up and Further In" when I got a comment on it out of the blue; aside from the initial check-for-mistakes reads, I hadn't revisited that one, I think because it was such a bear to write that looking at it just exhausted me. But now, all that is long enough ago that I can just enjoy it - and hey, it was pretty good!

Heh. Now I want to hear everyone else's take on this, so I can see if my writer-ego is amazingly out of whack. Confessions? Slap-downs? Meta?