Ah, every word a carefully polished gem, every phrase an artfully crafted … um, okay … every phrase a masterfully crafted work of art … um, no, how about … every phrase a artfully crafted work of a master?

Screw it … I’ll try that one again tomorrow.

Everything you read in books of magazines is painstakingly edited and polished until it meets the standard of that particular publishing house.  First, by the writer, who knows that the chances of selling a story is greatly increased with every extra bit of polish.  So writers tend to nurse a story along, carefully and lovingly, until it is perfect.  Every word a multi-facetted gem, every phrase a masterpiece of expression, sub-plots and characterizations flawless, locations described brilliantly (getting a maximum amount of impact from the minimum amount of words), and an ending that will tear the reader’s heart out … while still permitting a possible sequel, somewhere down the line.

They we hand our creation, our precious, our child to an editor … who gleefully pisses all over it in the belief that’ll taste better afterward.  (It is a well known and medically established fact that, much the same way that an elephants nearest biological kin is the nine pound rock hyrax, the nearest biological kin to an editor is a wolverine … the only scientific question still regarding this odd, but obvious, relationship is which is the higher evolutional critter?)  It is a constant wonder that more editors haven’t been savaged by rampaging packs of crazed writers and it is the believe of many that this is the reason writers are paid so little … keeps them too weak to rampage.

Which is all well and good, but doesn’t even begin to explain where this particular page comes in, does it?

Well, this is where I intend to keep my unfinished and rough stories.  Feel free to browse at will and comment at your own risk.  As each story becomes ready to sacrifice on the altar of publication, it will be moved over to the published fiction page, where it will be free to mingle with others of it’s kind, happily playing and frolicking about and wondering how to get the smell of editor out of it’s fur.