#also i fixed my em dashes long ago in my main document but a lot of earlier ao3 chapters still have en dashes instead

[quaranmine]

Finished my final edit of Firewatch AU last night, so I will try to update the AO3 chapters to reflect this shortly. Don't worry much about major changes. Most changes were grammatical or slight rewords of sentences.

A few times I would slightly alter a sentence so that it lined up more with the established canon of the story. One side effect of writing a story over a year and uploading it chapter by chapter is that sometimes you get lines in earlier chapters that don't make as much sense with the direction the story actually went in. For example, and I think I already edited this on AO3, but originally when Grian reported Mumbo missing in chapter one he told the ranger on the phone several places he thought Mumbo might have gone. I changed this to Grian just saying what trail he took, because it's quite clear later in the story that Mumbo had told Grian his specific plan for a specific trail. It no longer made sense for Grian to be unclear on where he was. We go through this very thoroughly in the middle of the fanfic, Mumbo was supposed to be on the Cloud Lake Trail! It is an interesting thought to consider that perhaps Grian was always a little fuzzy on the details of where Mumbo was going, and that he just later talked himself into 100% believing that he always knew the exact location. But I didn't really intend for that, and that does start to get into the weeds a little bit on the level of nuance a reader will pick up on. So I changed it.

Functionally though, this change was like....5 words within a sentence. Like I said, not major changes, just little things to keep the story aligned.

Another example of a larger reword is that I changed my fire finder math to exclude the part about finding the elevation of the fire based on the vertical angle. This is because I had to change the height of Grian's lookout (in my internal notes) so that it would be below the treeline for the Greater Yellowstone Area. My only experience with treeline is in Colorado where it's about ~11,500 ft and I hadn't realized that it varied so widely in other mountain ranges, so I orginally put Grian's lookout at far too high an elevation to still be surrounded by trees. I also finalized the height of his lookout by looking at standard lookout schematics and the amount of stairs it has. If you're curious, I originally had it at around ~10,800 ft, and changed it to ~8,700 ft. I also changed the height of the lookout from 45 ft (non standard) to 40 ft (a standard height.)

Because I changed that height, I needed to recheck my math and fix it. But when I went back to that problem, I had a lot of difficulty figuring out how I had calculated it last year. I did eventually find the calculation I used as a base in my 1958 fire lookout handbook, but when I scrutinized that more closely I was unsure I even interpreted it correctly last year. (The person who wrote this in 1958 did not do a great job of explaining certain things.) I also realized that most lookouts just report the vertical angle and nothing else. Like, you're only expected to report the angle, not the elevations. I even found a video of a fire lookout explaining the Osborne Fire Finder where he mentioned calculating elevation of the fire, and mentioned that it is pretty dificult and generally only experienced lookouts report that, and that he had three years of experience and still only reported the angle.

So because I only want to include things I know are accurate, and I was unsure of the math, and I found out most lookouts don't even report that math to begin with, I just changed it to talk about the vertical angle. Probably better for the readers I lost with the math, anyway!

Anyway, that's the type of edits I did mostly LOL

#also i fixed my em dashes long ago in my main document but a lot of earlier ao3 chapters still have en dashes instead #and unfortunately the ao3 font makes en dashes look identical to hyphens #so when i update the chapters it will improve that readibility too #drives me nuts! i promise i know that you don't use hyphens for that! they were always supposed to be em dashes! #i think the em dash correction only appears chapter 8 and onward #so now it will soon be all the chapters #hc_firewatch_au