Shadow on The Mountain is Finished!

Well, almost finished, all 93,405 words of it. The story is complete, now I've got the eye crossin' work of editing to do.

Writing a story is a great pleasure... editing is simply the monotonous, dreary, has to be done, work at the end. I'd compare it to owning horses. Riding a fine horse in new country up in the mountains on a sunny day is a complete joy. To be horseback, high on those sunny slopes, with a view clear to forever? Why, that's as fine a thing as you can ask for.

Buuuuut... back at the barn those six stalls full of recycled alfalfa still have to be cleaned. Yup... along with the joy of a fine horse... comes the constant shoveling of wheel barrow loads of horse poop. Anybody claiming they enjoy that is either undiagnosed Nuts! or they're off their meds.

How-some-ever... if you want the one you have to accept the other... so it's editing I'll be doing.

The first pass is actually mostly entertaining. You're the first one to get to read the story in its entirety... double checking for context/continuity goofs, clumsy, tongue tangling wording and the BIG story line DOH's!

It's those second and third trips through that get to requiring a disciplined effort. They are abso-freakin-lootly when it becomes a JOB. Those are  the passes where you're looking over each word for the funny lil' miss-spellings that your mind overlooked the last two tries... and all the other such small typo blips in your authorial endeavor.

So... the story is done... but there remains a lot of work to follow up before Ben is back on the shelf with his Fresh tale.

Mr Coffee is keepin' the pot hot and I'm hard at it...

~ BK Gore