When does it end?

After successfully submitting a story to People's Friend magazine, I have decided to try again while the iron is hot, so have begun preparation of three more stories from my stock.

Since they have a special Christmas Edition, actually a separate magazine, I have created a story for that. I am aiming for about 1500 words, and am arriving thereabouts, give or take a couple of hundred.

On taking each story from stock, in its draft form, several hours of firtling produced a passable effort, such that I thought it might have reached a suitable stage for submission. I asked two good friends to take a gander, and the answers came back - fine!

I had a lot of fun formatting the documents, adjusting them to remove widows and orphans and so on, then printed a draft to enable me to do a final edit. The blasted thing was set at A5, so I got and A5 document, printed on an A4 sheet. Lovely!!!!!

I reformatted them, then went through again, reuniting the widows and orphans with their respective families and then printed drafts again. After some minor corrections, I was happy - until I woke in the night, went to sit on the pot, and got to thinking.

The result? A revisit to the stories and the addition of about 350 more words!

At what point do I stop? At what point does it cease to be a short short, and become a short, or at what point a feature? I have to decide where to stop, for I suspect I could keep at it like a dog with a particularly juicy bone.

I suspect that the point that I stop revising is when I seal the envelope containing the MSS and actually stick it into the post box, and am prevented from touching it further!