Done.

What a relief. I have finally finished putting together my first short story collection, Rising Above: Stories. I did the final edits over the weekend and had it printed and bound yesterday, and will be submitting it this week to the University of Iowa Press for their Iowa Short Fiction Award.

This project was a rather bold undertaking for a hesitant procrastinator such as myself, given that I only found out about the contest in late August and was facing a September 30 deadline. Only seven of the twenty-five stories were already in finished form when I started, with the rest requiring extensive revisions. And one story, "The Way Business is Done," was only partially written at the time.

I'm pretty pleased with the results, less for the quality of the writing itself than the fact that I took on this big project and got it done in time, in defiance of my general nature. I think the writing is pretty decent, but I'm under no illusions that it's publishable in its present form. A lot of the pieces are more sketches than full-fledged stories, and one or two of the stories need more work that I didn't have time to complete before the deadline. I really don't expect to win the Iowa contest, but I'm glad I had the learning experience of working diligently under a deadline. This story collection remains very much a work in progress--before I submit it again elsewhere, I'm sure I'll be deleting several of the shorter pieces, adding new stories and refining what's already there.

That being said, I'm rather burned out from the whole editing process--I really don't enjoy editing very much--and I'll be taking the month of October off from fiction writing to recharge the old batteries.