IWSG and When Do you Know You’re Done?

Happy early Halloween!  Another month has come and gone, and it’s time to get insecure!

Wait, that came out wrong.  Anyway, it’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group day!  On the first Wednesday of every month, bloggers get together to share their deep seated insecurities, and find/offer support across the blogosphere.

ISWG is captained by Alex J. Cavanaugh.  The awesome co-hosts for the October 5 posting of the IWSG are Beverly Stowe McClure, Megan Morgan, Viola Fury, Madeline Mora-Summonte, Angela Wooldridge, and Susan Gourley!

The question this month is when do you know your story is ready?

The truth is, both never and whenever you feel like it

To clarify, I can always keep working on a story.  I grow and change as a writer every day, and I could revise the same story a dozen times, and come up with something new, and probably better to me, because my taste will have changed since the last revision.  I’ve even thought about doing this for the two stories I’ve already self-published, Shadow and Wings.

I re-read them recently, and found a number of things I’d like to change, because I’ve learned a lot since publishing those stories.  Which leads to the second part of my answer.

At some point, you have to decide that you’re done.  After a couple revisions each and a pass through my critique group, I made that decision with Shadow and Wings.  While I might entertain fantasies of revising both those stories and releasing new editions, I won’t be doing it.

Because, it would never end.  That feeling never goes away for me.  I would look back on every story I published and decide it needed to be fixed.  Not because it wasn’t a perfectly good story, but because I had changed, and it wasn’t the story I would have written anymore.

I have no regrets about what I’ve published.  I’m ready to move on to something new.