Recently, it has come to my attention that my manuscript/baby is a little too...how should one say? Healthy. Large. Pleasantly plump.
It needs a haircut. A weight-loss regime. To tighten and tone its not-so-tiny tuckus. According to a several sources, it needs to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 90-100K words to be most appealing to potential agents and publishers.
At 147K my baby's got back. And while that triggers fond memories of a remix of Sir Mix-a-Lot 1990s classic ("I like big books and I cannot lie, you other brothers can't deny..."?), I know I need to get out the pruning shears and get to work. Serious work. 30% reduction kind of work.
This, of course, presents a bit of a problem since I wasn't just typing "ipsum lorem dolor sit amet" 36,750 times. No, I wrote what I consider to be a tightly woven tale with a plot arc and themes and everything. So losing 40,000+ words is no small feat.
I did a first pass and managed to cut 5,000 words here and there. Apparently, I reached for the shears and grabbed a scalpel instead.
Now I'm faced with the far-more challenging task of big cuts. Forget the shears, I need a freaking ax. I have to acknowledge (and execute on) the fact that I'm going to have to hack out whole scenes, entire pages, characters, and parts of the plot that I've become hugely attached to over the past two and a half years.
Commence the slash and burn campaign...
{sobbing} {falling to crumpled heap} {wailing, "NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!}
It needs a haircut. A weight-loss regime. To tighten and tone its not-so-tiny tuckus. According to a several sources, it needs to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 90-100K words to be most appealing to potential agents and publishers.
At 147K my baby's got back. And while that triggers fond memories of a remix of Sir Mix-a-Lot 1990s classic ("I like big books and I cannot lie, you other brothers can't deny..."?), I know I need to get out the pruning shears and get to work. Serious work. 30% reduction kind of work.
This, of course, presents a bit of a problem since I wasn't just typing "ipsum lorem dolor sit amet" 36,750 times. No, I wrote what I consider to be a tightly woven tale with a plot arc and themes and everything. So losing 40,000+ words is no small feat.
I did a first pass and managed to cut 5,000 words here and there. Apparently, I reached for the shears and grabbed a scalpel instead.
Now I'm faced with the far-more challenging task of big cuts. Forget the shears, I need a freaking ax. I have to acknowledge (and execute on) the fact that I'm going to have to hack out whole scenes, entire pages, characters, and parts of the plot that I've become hugely attached to over the past two and a half years.
Commence the slash and burn campaign...
{sobbing} {falling to crumpled heap} {wailing, "NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!}
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