Over the years, my children's manuscript, "The Very Best of Friends" a.k.a. "A Thief on the Beach" must have been tweaked at least a dozen times, if not more. The original story was written a while back - this means at least twenty years ago - but the basic story line remains the same.
The tale focuses on two best of friends, Jeremy Goat and Freddy Fox, who compliment each other but not necessarily in a positive way. The young goat has an uncontrollable, voracious appetite for just about everything and the sly fox lives to play pranks on the community of animals living in Pottersville, located "a half mile down from the best beach around."
The story has always remained close to my heart and hence the reason for the various updates over the years. When it comes to updating, I'm the 'queen of tweaking." The pattern is to "fix" it, put it away for a year or more, pull it out of storage periodically, "fix" it again and so on. It's been a while since the friends have seen the light of day in the true sense of the word and a read-through brought with yet more changes.
Reading through it, I found some inconsistencies along with one or two superfluous characters that were eliminated. No sooner had they disappeared then they were brought back in a different form. I spent the weekend updating/tweaking/fixing - call it what you want - and managed to re-write four pages. So far, so good but then I always say that. There are a lot of positive messages within the story line, which is one of the main reasons I've stuck with it, in addition to light humor.
This time round I'd really like to seek out a publisher, electronic or print, not sure yet. Being that it's for young children although adults would also enjoy the story, it would require illustrations.
It also lends itself to a cartoon, given the dialogue and characters but first things-first, the priority of which is to finish the last re-write.
More progress reports to follow. To paraphrase the mischievous Freddy: "what are we waiting for?"
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