I personally don't post until a story is 100% finished -- or at least, until it's only requiring final edits to get it ready to go. My muse is too fickle, and my writing time too unpredictable, to lay out a posting schedule with any confidence while I'm still writing. I did that once, when I was 90% done with a WiP and figured I'd have no problem finishing ... only to have things get crazy and I ended up totally stressed out trying to get the last few chapters written. I told myself never again, LOL.
As for getting encouragement to finish or feedback on where to take a certain scene, that's what I use betas for. If I was writing regularly on a long story, I might send out chapter by chapter as they were finished ... or I might wait until I wrote myself into a corner and send out the whole thing so far to see how it was received, in hopes it would give me some fresh insight on where to go.
Once I've posted to the board, I take the feedback into account when getting the story ready for the archive. If there was a scene that confused the readers, I might add in some explanation or better sounding dialogue to clarify things. Or if a character did something that didn't ring true to the readers, I might take an extra look at his/her scenes and decide if I agree. And certainly, if readers caught typos, I was glad to hear of them! But my hope was always that anything major would have been caught during the writing and editing process -- either by myself (I reread my work constantly while writing and always try to beta my own work well before anyone else sees it) or by the other writers I enlist to give feedback along the way. My goal was always to get a story as close to "perfect" as I could before I post it.
Which is probably why it takes me so long to finish a story, LOL.
Kathy
