Well, my backwards-in-time story (freshly rejected from F&SF) is all packaged up to go to Analog. I decided that I wasn’t happy with the opening on the F&SF version, so I made some minor adjustments. It is a tricky thing, deciding whether or not to change a draft before resending. I have a tendancy to feel rather negative about drafts that come back rejected, and so that can bias me to want to fiddle with things that may not actually need it. BUT, thinking back to when I sent this out, I wasn’t entirely happy with the opening few paragraphs last time around, so I set myself a time limit (I could tinker as much as I wanted, but only this morning) and started in on the part I wasn’t happy with. As it happened, I just ended up moving a couple paragraphs around and making some very minor edits, which I’m already done with…so I’m finished with an hour and a half to spare. Anyway, since I’m happy with the end result, I think the minor revising was a good thing, at least this time around.
Now off to the post office to drop it in the mail!
Unless you’re getting positive comments with your rejections, I don’t see anything wrong with tweaking a draft before submitting elsewhere.
Tristan
Yeah, good point about the positive comments. I tend to be pretty negative about stories even when they get the more positive rejections, and that’s probably the time when I need to resist the urge to tweak things.