Booya!!! They're Done!!

This morning I finished the rough draft of "Legacy of Flies", the eighth and final ghost story needed for my Shades anthology. It weighs in at 12, 631 words, a novelette like most of the other stories in the collection. These eight stories should result in a decent sized book that has about seventy thousand words once finished. (edit; a quick word count obtained by adding the different manuscripts reveals a count of 69,457. That could change as time goes on.) I still need to write an introduction, but that's only a few paragraphs and doesn't really count. The point is I now have all eight ghost stories I needed to make this anthology what I wanted it to be.

The stories are... (in no particular order)

Storm Chase,
A Memory of Me,
Death and White Satin,
An Echo of Blood and Mirrors,
Legacy of Flies,
A Singularity of Purpose,
Dance of the Ancients,
and
A Long, Cold Forever of a Night.

All exist in different stages of refinement, but all are written. Yet a lot of work remains.

Now begins the editing. I intend to go through the tales, story by story, and edit each one with a highly critical eye. I will need to review the stories for flow, and also figure out the order in which they should appear in the anthology. I pretty much want "A Long, Cold Forever of a Night" to be the last one, but other than that the order is open to whatever works best.

Then, once I have the introduction written and the stories edited, arranged in order, and all put together in one manuscript, I'll need to decide how I will format it for publication. Do I attempt to format it for the kindle myself? I've done a couple of single short stories, but this would be a much bigger project and I also want a couple of bells and whistles like a clickable table of contents...things that are currently beyond my skills. I will also have to decide if I want to go through Createspace and make a physical copy of the book. I would kind of like one of those...which means I'll have a lot more to learn.

So that's where things are now. An important milestone has been reached, but I still have a long way to go.

But the adventure is in the journey :)