Editing vs. writing

I have a completed short story, ~20,000 words, that's "readable" now but really needs some solid editing love from me before I'd post it for all to see. (Editing it would probably drop the word count total quite a bit, maybe by 25%).

I also have a serialized-novel-to-be that I'm working on... I don't write as much as I should, but I'm working on that, and so far I'm around 7000 words with it. Everything I've written so far would also need serious editing love before I'd post it.

I'm pretty sure I should just keep writing on the novel-to-be until I have something like 15,000-20,000 words in it, do the editing on it, and then start posting it as I continue to write more. However, I'm an impatient soul, so a part of me wants to post something, anything, to get people reading, even though editing the completed short would probably stop me from writing the novel for the duration. Still... I want to get the novel story told. I want to get a big pile of it written, so it can get edited and give me a nice big backlog to work under safely when I finally do start posting it. So I should write it...

Just airing my thoughts. Input welcome if you have any.


For reference: completed short is "The Prince's Hunt" and the serialized novel is "The Elemental Magician"

Getting to know the protagonist.

I did a question (or two)-a-day style character development meme over on my main writing site for the protagonist of the Elemental Magician, Eli. If you've been reading it aleady, I just posted the last of the questions here. If you haven't read it yet, the series starts here and you can read through the whole thing just by clicking the next button on each post =)