Since last we spoke, I reached the end of my first round of vicious edits. I managed to cut 95 pages from the draft. You read that right—95 pages! There was some really fun stuff in there, and ideally, I’ll be able to repurpose it in the next book. For now, it’s all in my “deleted scenes” folder. I probably can’t do anything with plot stuff, but there’s plenty of dialogue in one-off scenes that may live to see a better day.
After cutting all those pages, I needed to go back to my beat sheet and renumber the pages so I would still have a good roadmap of the latest draft. Once I updated that, I went to the last page in each chapter, looking for widows I could kill. I’m talking about chapters that end with only a few lines at the top of the page—the majority of the page is blank. Finding a way to cut enough lines at the end of chapters so they don’t spill over to waste a whole new page is pretty easy. I think I lopped five pages from the total that way.
Now I’m on the home stretch before it goes back to my editor. I didn’t kill any major storylines, but I am successfully continuing to winnow down the word and page count. The last few years of writing my 101-word stories have absolutely given me editing skills I never had before. The writing’s getting tighter.
Even though I did not meet my deadline (which is today), I’m still feeling good about crossing the finish line by the next time you hear from me.
Time to get back to it.
Scotty out
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