Interlude
K.T.'s getting kind of pissed at me for constantly raking him with gunfire, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to just thank anyone who's actually keeping up with this story. Sleight of Hands is a project five years in the making, the flagship story of a long dreamed up series of stories called The Mercenary Cycle, which also claims Enemies Disguised Enemies(for any of you that have read that). I have to apologize for the length of time between installments of this story. The "final" draft had actually been completed well before I finished college, but when I looked back on this monstrosity, weighing in at 135 pages and spanning over 84,000 words as it was, I thought it really needed yet another tech edit, to make it flow and to knock out some of the kinks. The new final project is already over a hundred pages long, and I predict about two hundred pages and over 100,000 words before I finish everything up. It's a long story with a long down time between installments, but I'll keep on trying to get the rest of it up and running as soon as possible. For those of you that have never tried a line by line rewrite of this magnitude, well, it's a very long, very painstaking process. Not to mention that I have to do editing on other stories, before Beth and Diane get angry and track me down and kill me.
While I'm here giving K.T. a rest, I'd also like to thank Norm, the incredible, merciless Nevermore, for reading, rereading, and then rereading again. There are four major drafts to this story, all of which he has personally gone through and blasted to pieces in the hopes that I might accomplish something worthwhile with Microsoft Word 6.0. Without him, the story you are now reading would be worth even less than it currently is. Kudos to the Chief(and only) Editor.
So thanks for the time and patience. And now, on with the show…