How much editing do you generally put your fics through before posting? Do you post them up "raw" (i.e., essentially unedited except for major spelling errors), or do you try to really polish them?

Generally speaking, when I post a fic it's "raw". It's always in the 'first draft' stage. Which isn't to say there are going to be other drafts, but to say that this is the only incarnation of the fic-as-an-entity that has ever existed. With the exception for 'Broken Wings' and the fics I wrote for "Ex Machina", I don't have beta readers and I don't do rewrites -- this is true for everything I write, from term papers to fanfic. But that's really a product of how I write things in the first place. Since I (generally) have at least an impression of what the shape of the fic-as-an-entity is like -- an idea as to what the ending of a fic is going to be and a general sense of the path I need to take to get there -- I can edit as I type. If a word or phrase isn't right, I stop, go back, and change it before going on; if the focus isn't right, or it changes suddenly -- if, say, focusing on the feelings of a character and the sources of those feelings doesn't work as well as focusing on the physical actions and letting the emotions sort of loom in the background -- I go back and stick in the appropriate paragraphs to make the shift make sense. I (almost always) know where I'm heading when I begin a fic, so I can back track and take detours and go by the scenic route and stop at the points of interest and do it all on the same road trip, so to speak.

I think the fact that I polish as I go is partially due to the way I form sentences. But more than that, I think this habit of mine is due to the fact that I'm very private about the things I write. I don't like to have people see the false starts, the points where I changed my mind, the dross that always has to be shifted through before I can get to the finished product. See, I used to do all of my ficcing in notebooks, largely because notebooks were what I had at hand to scribble my inspirations down on when they hit me, since inspiration usually struck while I was at school. And it used to be uncomfortable to use a computer; I have a horrible tendency to slouch when I sit at a desk, to sit with a lot of pressure on my tailbone, so back when I was using a desktop, I couldn't sit and fic for more than a few hours before it got too uncomfortable and I had to stop. So, back then, even though I had a computer, I still hand-wrote a lot of fic stuff. Which was really, really messy, because, again, the focus would change or the phrasing wouldn't be right, or I'd need to add in some new information at some future point. So, by the time I was ready to type the fic up and post it, I'd be looking at a text with all these arrows and little asterisks and blocked off text and scratched out lines. And sometimes I'd have fics that started in one notebook, hit the middle in a different one, and finished in a third; and all of this fic-A work would be surrounded by work for fic-B and fic-C and how to integrate co-tangents, or what were the contributing factors to the Spanish-American war. Because of all this, it just became habit to clean the fic up as I was typing and prepping for posting; and even now, when I use the computer for almost all of my fic-related doings, I still have this mind set that if it's being typed, it's going to be posted as soon as I've typed the last word. Because, in my mind, all of the necessary polishing has already been done and this is just putting the fic into a format which allows it to be shared.

So, what this all boils down to, is that when I hit that spot where I go, "Yeah. This fic is done." I'm really done. That's it. Nothing needs to be added. (This is also why I don't ever write down the endings for a fic before it's actually done. If I do that, then my brain automatically goes into the "Oh, it's finished" mode and I never write anything else about that fic again. Although, interestingly enough, I can write serial fics -- fics that can be read as unique entities but also do double duty as components for a longer, messier fic -- entirely out of order.) And so when I post, I think of the posted-fic as being done as well. It's a finished product. It's not going to change; well, okay, that's not entirely true. I'll go back and fix glaring errors of spelling/grammar/dropped subjects, maybe add a word here or there to make a phrase nicer, but that's all superficial stuff. The basic content won't change; the only exception to this is 'Broken Wings', which needs a rewrite so desperately that it overcomes the 'doneness' of the fic. But this "It's done, don't touch it" mindset creates a problem for me, because after I wrote 'Overs', I realized that there was a series waiting to happen there, and it was an interesting series that would let me track the evolution of a relationship and explore things like friendship and aging and duty and so forth and so on. And I'm vaguely annoyed because 'Overs' is done, and I don't want to go back and change it, yet to make everything consistent, I'm going to have to go and tweak a couple of things. Now if I was a better writer, I'd be able to work within the 'canon' of 'Overs' and not have to change a damned thing. But, sadly, I'm not.

So. There you go.

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