THE END

Experienced something I thought might never happen this morning. Stood by and observed as my fingers typed the last pages of Raised by Savages. 341 pages. 97 thousand words. Felt sad. Understood that it is a new project now. Back to the beginning to sift the whole pile like flour. Back when I was a lad, one of the jobs Ma gave me was to sift the flour she used for baking bread. We got commodity flour and most of the times there were little black bugs in it. They were the size of BBs or smaller, and hard and they cracked when I squished them with my fingernail. The new job with RBS is to sift all 97 thousand words and take out all the black bugs.

300 PAGES PLUS

Okay, here we go. Another landmark. 300 plus pages of Raised by Savages done. Probably 200 decent pages. The rest need going over. Had an inspiring email from Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing (excellent reads, btw). He said that most writers don's spend enough time with their stories. I've taken heed and am patiently (sometimes impatiently) going over the content again and again. I'm hoping the time and diligence will make it appealing and not appalling.