I can see the finish line

See that?  It's a bit in the distance but it's getting closer.  If you squint your eyes and concentrate it'll come into focus for you too.  Yep.  That's right.  It's the finish line.  I know.  It seemed like I'd been running in place all this time.  Trust me, patience is a virtue that I certainly don't possess but we're in the home stretch now.  Can almost feel it, can't ya?  I know I can.

What am I blathering on about?  Today is my birthday!  And one of the cooler presents I've gotten are THE LINE EDITS TO GHOSTS OF DEMONS PAST!  Yeppers, you read right.  My editor finished up going through my manuscript today.  It's a gargantuan load off my mind.  Feels as if a lifetime has passed since I'd first written the damn thing.  Seemed like I'd never get to this point.  But I'll say this: it was worth the wait.  Hiring a pro editor is by far the best decision I made during this whole process.  Are there a lot of red marks?  Sure, but it's mostly superficial stuff; a weird sentence here, a punctuation blooper there, an odd detail muffed up once in a great while.  The book will be even better for having been scoured through by a set of seasoned eyes.  However, the plot remains unchanged.  The character development remains unchanged.  In other words:  the story is SOLID.  

Of course, a solid story without plot holes or any major mistakes is one thing.  The real test is if it's enjoyable or not.  Is Ghosts of Demons Past an enjoyable read?  I think it is.  Then again, I'm biased.  Over a dozen beta readers happen to agree with me.  What about my editor?  While she was finishing it up today, she'd tweeted me to say that she had to read ahead to see what happened and THEN go back so she could focus on finishing up the final few chapters.  Yep.  Got its hooks in her!  

This is a recurring theme with me, but I don't like to toot my own horn.  I'm of the mind that there's a fine line between being confident and being delusional, and it's one I try hard not to cross.  That being said, I think I'm onto something with this book, with this character. 

Now that the finish line draws closer, I guess we'll see what we'll see, right?  I'm gonna bust my balls to go through the line edits and clean this thing up for final proofreading.  After that, it's on to formatting for kindle then the nerve wracking moment when I hit that 'publish' button on Amazon.  

I'd hoped to get it out sometime in June.  Looks like that wasn't a bad target.  June's getting closer.

Just like the finish line.  Can ya see it more clearly now?  I think we just got a few steps closer to it.