The second draft of “Fish Girl and the Kapok Spirits” is going well, thanks to some very thoughtful comments from my raft of first-draft readers.  Apparently I need to get rid of some ‘and’s, some exposition, and punch up some of the drama in the key moments.  This is all extremely doable, so I’m feeling pretty good about it.  Editing is really tough for me, as I suspect it is for most authors.  I fall in love with a story the way it stands, and some of my favorite passages don’t neccessarily translate well out of my head and onto the paper, so I’m working on telling myself that the more I treat my short stories like my poetry, where each word has to carry more weight than its body size, the less it hurts to get rid of the ones that don’t carry their load.  “Fish Girl” was already a short work for me, so finding the excess and filling out the thin spots is a definite learning experience.

Also exciting news on the modern epistolary project with the delightful exDevlin.  I love collaborating with authors/friends whose style and creativity I admire, and I think this one is going to be a fascinating endeavor and hopefully a fairly unique concept.  Her Clara and my Ren have the skeletons of some wonderful characters, and it’s going to be a blast working with her to flesh them out, along with the world in which they live.  (I’m half-hoping to convince her to incorporate a little art into this project too, though that’s definitely a conversation for much further into the planning process.)   But the good news is that this project is getting off the ground, and looking like immense fun, so stay tuned.