I believe since my last visit to the site, I’ve finished the first a themed short story collection. By “finish”, I mean I opted more to leave it once it got up to a certain collective length. And by “first draft” I actually mean more like the second draft (ok, maybe first and a half?), because this entire collection was initially written by hand, and then I spent entirely too long transferring that to a digital format, which a bit of light editing as I went.
Now what’s got me busy is going through the entire collection doing a more proper editing, aka What works and what doesn’t and what I mistyped and what would work better and what the hell did I mean there and why did I even bother with trying this particular story, and the like.
From there, I plan to cram it all together into a single, readable (/perhaps writable) file and send it off to some beta readers. It’s a full book in size and won’t be read for pleasure as much as read critically, and I’m probably the slowest reader I know to start with and so can’t judge, so I certainly won’t be expecting to hear back from anyone for a good while after I send it out to them. At which point more editing (and almost certainly full rewrites of parts) will begin.
Rinse and repeat, until it’s ultimately in the best shape I can get it to be, at which point I’ll start shopping it around to publishers.
So with that as a primary creative pursuit, along with regular Daddy duties (often enjoyable, sometimes not, but always tiring, particularly now that her lessons have started up in earnest) and a pretty regular short mid-day shift, all keeps me hopping.
I’ll post more as I can.