I have a plan. I tend to rush the ends of stories in my eagerness to have another story out in the world, being read and considered by editors. All that accomplishes is frustrating my friends who are willing to crit stories for me; they have to say it still needs lots of work and I get to sit down and work on it again.

Anyway, I have decided that slow and steady is more important than quick, and the emphasis is on steady. I am revising a story now ("Immolation") that I wrote back in February -- in fact, I was so pumped up after WorldCon that I wrote 1500 new words of this story on the plane on the way home. My next step here is to revise the rest of it, cutting and massaging the text so it's all of a piece. Once that's done, I'm going to have to let it sit for a bit before I look at it again, so I have some distance when I revise it. So. The plan is, while I'm letting "Immolation" percolate, I'm going to work on revising "Skatebirding" (which will need even more than 1500 words added to it to make it work the way I want it to). When that's ready to simmer, I'll either go back to "Immolation" and spiff it up before I ask for crits again, or I'll write something new if that's not ready. All the while I will continue plodding along adding words to the novel (I do that on the train during the week, so it's a different kind of writing time for right now).

This is my plan. Letting stuff sit is a big part of my writing process, and I think it's important, but to keep the steady part I'll just always have something else to work on. At some point I'll be done with the novel and have to work on revising that, but that's big and scary and I'd best not dwell on that right yet. And this way I keep producing stories, which will make me feel productive and not all sad about my writing career. Hopefully the slow part will mean really good stories.

Now off to revise "Immolation".