A Whole Lot of Jack

Jack and the Mountain is finished, or, I should say, the part that I can do on my own is finished. It has been written, read, reread, rewritten, shuffled, rewritten, added to, reread, and, finally, finished. To be honest, I'm sick of looking at it. When I open it to certain sections, it reads fairly well to me, but when I try to hold the entire thing in my mind, it just feels like this big mass of months and days and years that I can't quite grasp. It may be a complete waste of effort. We'll see.

I am, however, holding on to this: My brother and I did this thing together. Even if everyone hates it, we completed a project together and that means something. Greg, by the way, is an extraordinarily creative dude and I'm proud that we made something as a team, whether it goes anywhere or not. That, in fact, is where the book is sitting now. It is in his and my sister Merrilee's mailbox for review. I have printed a copy for my wife since she prefers to read it all on paper. The next step is for me to prod and poke them through reading the thing (and beg some assistance from my writer friends Kay, Jonelle and Jonathon to do the same.) Hopefully, they will all offer up changes and edit suggestions. Then I make those, then I reread, then I may reshuffle, then I may rewrite, then...eventually, it'll be finished and ready to see if it can find a home, either with an agent or a press. I am crossing my fingers that I will be at that stage within a month but I don't have any real idea how long it will take.

I have a suspicion that if it is not extraordinarily good, it will take a lot longer than that. It's hard to read half-baked writing so a word to the wise; If anyone ever asks you to be a reader for them, know that you're in for a LOT of work.

Anyway, I've delivered echoing and rattling train-cars full of words. Having started as half-visualized concepts and loose story arcs they have boogied down the tracks, swayed around the corners and, finally, crossed the bridge to arrive in the station as a fully realized 140,000 word Garamond type-faced digital document. I'm hoping and praying that they didn't get too shook up on journey. I'm hoping they won't just turn out to be a whole lot of Jack.

Chris