hmm.

Beta response (including NoLongerKid, who also got conscripted into reading it) to my NPT monster 20k fic: going to have to be majorly reworked. I think I kind of knew this when I sent it out to beta, but I was successfully repressing the part of myself that was telling myself that... With the pushing back of the NPT deadline, it turned out I might have time to rework it after all, and so I started, and then I realized that a) once I carefully thought through one of the major characters, I found he was going to have to be deleted because he could not coexist with one of the requested plot elements, and b) I am not capable of thinking through one of the major things I'd have to think through to make it work. (Or at least I'm not capable of wanting to do it enough?)

At some point I'll have to make a post on how incredibly awesome betas are (I've been lucky enough to always have really, really great betas). But right now I have to work on what I'm writing instead (which to be fair is cribbing liberally from the monster)... this one is significantly less ambitious, but rather better written (though it's got its own problems), and started out as 1k and is now 4k and counting. Sigh. Still, if it doesn't get too much longer, I'm hopeful that it'll be a size where I can actually mess with it properly.