[adora]

Have you finished the whole novel already (and just publishing chapter by chapter) or are you writing and changing as you go?

Also, this might make more sense for non-fiction work but what are your thoughts on letting a book evolve over time? So the writer updates and changes the content as s/he learns new things (and obviously lets readers know when edited).

[MattTaibbi]

I would say we're more than half done. We still need to power through a big chunk of the story. It's kind of a high-wire act but we're both enjoying it.

I think letting a book evolve can have varying consequences. In reality you want it all to be stylistically consistent. But you can't publish 200 pages, see a problem, and change it on the fly. (Dostoyevsky appeared to do this in "The Possessed," changing from first to third person and back). On the other hand, the pressure of having to meet deadlines might make it more intense. So it could go either way. A lot of great, great books have been serialized and a lot of them had an hard-driving feel to them (In Cold Blood, I think, wss one, as were the Fear and Loathing books).

[emodendroket]

The Idiot is also famously muddled largely because it was written for serialization and he left himself a bunch of loose ends he could pick up if he didn't know what to do with the story.