I meet myself coming out the door.

My second book is at the editor. I'm writing my story for my horse anthology. The anthology title is The Horse He Rode In On. My story is titled "From Two to Sixty-two."

I attended a Write Tight workshop this past Saturday and man, have I got my editing work cut out for me. Don McNair told us about 21 steps to take your manuscript through to write tight: for example, get rid of "ing" words. Do you know how many "ing" words are in a 44 chapter manuscript....a month's worth of looking (even with ing space in Find.) You have to decide if simple past tense will work in the sentence as is..or do you need to rewrite the sentence so simple past tense does make sense. And once you do that, there are only 20 more to go....it's overwhelming. I took a 4 page double spaced short story that was 1,700+ words and now have it right under 1,500 words....it works. It tightened up that story. But it took all day to do 3 of the steps on 4 pages. I'll be writing until I'm 100. Maybe I can learn to write tight to begin with and not need so much editing.

Saturday is my critique group, Quill Masters, meeting at Penara bread and that evening is the Mobile Writers' Guild Drink 'N' Skrawl! Fun!!! hic-up! I'm going to finish the story in my horse anthology while I still have my right brain creative side working. All that editing will put me in left brain mode. After writing the story, I'll start editing it. The anthology is open to people who want to write about their life with a horse or pony or many equines. You have until December 31, 2011 to submit and they can be as long or short as you like them. I'm going to set it up where all money made from the sale of the book will go into saving our wild horses.

If you'd like to submit, please send it to mobiledeelight07@bellsouth.net.