Reimagining a story I previously published.

Good Evening, all,
I wanted to reach out for feedback. The series that I have published to Lush, titled My Dirty Secrets, has been eating at me, and I feel like I didn't do it justice. I wanted some opinions on whether to delete the story as it exists, or if it is within the guidelines to rewrite it in a reimagined way. I have received positive feedback on the current version. As the creator of that little world, I have new ideas that can help me allow my characters to live on longer in a more meaningful and much more pleasurable capacity. My question is not very straightforward, and I apologize for that. Any feedback is much appreciated.
Thank you,
Max

I was in a similar situation. I had written something and it wasn't anything close to what I felt it could be. I deleted the original version, completely rewrote the story, and resubmitted it. I added a note for the mods making it clear what I did and why I did it. The new version was approved without any issues. I did lose all of the likes, favorites, and comments. But I was okay with that.

You might want to drop a note on your profile wall letting your followers know what you are doing and why. You can also add an author's note to the new version explaining your rational for doing a rewrite.

Thank you for your reply! How did you handle the loss of your original work? My concern is that I don't want to take away the work that I did, since some people did enjoy it. I don't want to sound like I'm winning a Pulitzer over my spicy writing hobby. It feels bad to me to take the originals from public view. It also feels bad to resubmit something very close in places to the original works.

While I feel a moderator could better answer this than I can, I too found myself in a similar situation with the first series (Book) I wrote here, titled "The Alpha Man in Me." Several years after it was published, I revisited it, added cover photos and edited each chapter mainly for grammar, although a couple of the earlier chapters were a little more than that.

What I didn't do was delete it.

I did my editing within the existing published template. Most importantly, I left an explanatory note for the moderator explaining exactly what I had done. I did this one chapter at a time, and they were all republished (with the changes) fairly quickly, with the likes and comments intact. 😀

It kind of depends on how different it's going to be. As wxt55uk says, if you're tidying it up for grammar or tightening a few things or changing the odd character detail to avoid retconning yourself in later chapters, that's ripe for just editing the original and leaving a note for the mods when you resubmit it. We do have a View Changes feature, but it's temperamental.

If, however, you're completely rebuilding it, it's probably better as a new submission, and leave a forwarding note on the old one with mention of the new chapter for anyone who stumbles across it (not sure links work in the Author Note field, I haven't tried).

Deleting the original is up to you, and will lose your views/comments, as mentioned above. Severely editing a piece with comments on does have the potential to invalidate comments that referred to older content, which could be confusing.

Mods have no obligation to reapprove old work if it's rewritten, or if it's resubbed after being deleted. We have the same amount of work to do to reapprove a heavily edited piece compared with reading a completely new piece, so you might reach out to the original mod(s) first and ask if they'd mind. That might steer your decision over which approach to take.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

Mods have no obligation to reapprove old work if it's rewritten, or if it's resubbed after being deleted. We have the same amount of work to do to reapprove a heavily edited piece compared with reading a completely new piece, so you might reach out to the original mod(s) first and ask if they'd mind. That might steer your decision over which approach to take.

Is it possible for us authors to find out which moderator approved your old story that you now want to change?

I have trouble remembering who moderated my last story, let alone one I wrote four years ago! 🙄🤣

This really helped me make a decision to pursue a complete rewrite. Thank you so very much. I believe the original story has enough merit to remain alive in its current form. I can make enough changes to the story to ensure it is different in all the right ways and thematically stay close to my vision without crossing lanes into plagiarizing myself. I cannot believe I've allowed a few, in my opinion, less-than-stellar timeline choices to paralyze my love of writing. Thank you all for your feedback! It truly gave me the confidence needed to pursue this project in a new and exciting way!

Quote by wxt55uk
Is it possible for us authors to find out which moderator approved your old story

Not easily, sadly. It depends how long ago it was. You can scroll back through your messages to mods and try to find it in the conversation, and clicking the "your recent story" links to find the one you're after, but it's hit and miss. If it's older than a few months, the message may have been auto deleted unless you starred it.

I agree with both wxt55uk and WW said. It depends on the scope of your changes. Minor edits and a handful of small changes, keep it.

In my case, I rewrote almost everything. I tweaked nearly 80% of the text (different words, better sentence constructs, more natural dialog, etc.). I also added two new chapters that tied up some loose ends and made the overall story better, in my opinion. The original version was one of the first stories I had written, long before I even knew Lush existed. And the writing was just BAD.

I also wanted to keep the original title. Had I opted to retain the original, I would have had to rename one of the two, create a new cover, etc. So, for me, deleting the original version was a easy decision.

I'm going with keeping some aspects of the story I liked, certain psychological elements of anticipation over consummation, and a strong guilt-desire oscillation. The voyeuristic trigger in the story also feels organic and transferable. I have had fun the last hour creating new characters to fill an existing timeline! It feels like my brain just got a cast off and can run again.

Quote by Spendingtime

I'm going with keeping some aspects of the story I liked, certain psychological elements of anticipation over consummation, and a strong guilt-desire oscillation.

I get that. The story I rewrote and republished was an idea that I loved - both the overall story and the characters. It just wasn't quite what I knew it could be, if that makes sense. The plot was strong. It was just missing something. Granted, I think the new version has gotten more hits and the feedback has been more meaningful.

I recently pulled down around a dozen of my stories for similar reasons. Great concepts. Characters I care deeply about. And most had received a significant number of views, likes, and positive comments. In one instance, again, it was one of the first stories I had written (long before I discovering Lush) and the writing was just BAD. In the other instance, I was disenchanted with how series were received on Lush, so I turned a longer story into a series of standalone stories. That never sat right with me. I plan to rewrite both. Whether I re-submit them on Lush or look for a platform that is open to longer stories (more than 10k words), we shall see.