Struggling Against the Wind of Submission

Heya, all you INKers! Submissions for the next critique group are due today by midnight!

I've been trying to get something ready, but I don't know if I'll make the deadline. I'll keep plugging away, though, as I want to get the story revision finished so I can concentrate on a newer story revision.

It is good to go over these older stories. I get a good sense of what I was trying to accomplish and where I went wrong and I'm having an easier time reworking them into a theme. It's also fun to see what language I used and how my usage has evolved. I was really wordy (okay, I'm still wordy, but not quite as wordy).

Example: In the old text I have "The wind had slept in the hours she had set out from the Iceholm, but the evening shadows had awoken it, and now she struggled against its icy attack as she made her way homeward."

Ugh, that's a mouthful. So I cut it down: "The wind had slept when she set out from the Iceholm. It woke with the evening and breathed icy daggers into her as she struggled homeward."

The sentence is also getting moved around in the paragraph. Still not liking the icy daggers cliche, but it'll work until I come up with something better. Icy breath? Breathed ice? Blew its icy breath?

Can't . . . turn . . . off . . . editing . . . brain . . .