Okay, I’ve spent the last three days mulling over the first three chapters of my epic women’s book. It has to be pared down from 175K words to somewhere around 100K.
The easy part was getting rid of the adverbs. LY words are appearing everywhere I look. They are the obvious sore thumbs.
Chapter 3 bit the dust completely. No one understand dream sequences anyway, and I can reinsert some of them at the appropriate times later on.
At the time I started writing, which was two years and two months ago, I had only a vague idea as to what my message was going to be. I was also into flowery prose and 300 word sentences. (Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but thanks to my friends, I have learned the finer points of using my words wisely.
I can see my confusion from back then glowing in the dark. This made it somewhat easy to chop, slash and burn away. Even so, I’ve only reduced the word count by 5K. Of course, I still have 32 more chapters to go, and if I continue on the same path, that means I will have weeded out 40K words. (I’m hoping more than that, but who knows?)
On the flip side, I’ve been neglecting WordPress and it shows. My stats stink. But, consider this, I am on a mission (from God?) and I want to have my rewrite complete to ship off to the real editor by the end of May. I’m sure he is looking forward to the income, and perhaps the entertainment.
