station pencil (smaller)Finishing the rough draft of a manuscript is both exciting and scary for me. The exciting part is pretty obvious, the creative work is done and simply needs to be fine tuned. The flip side to this is that self-doubt starts to creep in. I start to worry about the story. Is it fun and interesting? Did I leave out important details, cause inconsistencies, etc?

The only way to get through these butterflies is to spend time with the work. For me the most productive way to do this is to read the manuscript out loud, ideally to someone else. Hearing the story out loud helps me to find poorly written passages, re-used words, missing contractions, doubled up words, and any number of other problems. The other thing that reading the story out loud does for me is to restore my confidence in the work. I enjoy spending time my characters and I often find myself laughing at their interactions. And yes, I get how weird that sounds.

So what’s all that have to do with the picture? Nothing at all. The picture is just a freebie. It’s Roberto Garcia’s rendering of the Jeratorn space station which plays a prominent role the story.