Update on Rising Above

As I mentioned previously, I'm scrambling to assemble a short story collection for entry in the Iowa Short Fiction Award competition. I've pulled together 25 stories in various stages of completion--7 which were fully completed (and thus require no additional work), plus 16 which were first drafts which had yet to be edited and 2 which were not yet fully written. After a flurry of holiday weekend work, as of today those latter 18 have been through their first edits and are all typed up, ready for proofreading and the next round of revisions. Fortunately, all the stories that still need work are much shorter pieces that will probably end up constituting only about one-third of the entire collection, so there's not an overwhelming amount of revisions yet to be done. I'm facing a September 30 deadline, so time is rather tight.

I think I've solved the arrangement question that I mentioned in my earlier post. In lieu of an overriding theme, I've decided that the book will be divided up into sections--"Aging," "Growing," "Striving," "Relating," and "Coping"--with each story in a section adhering to the respective theme. (Some adhere faithfully, others tenuously.)