I did it once, now I have to do it again. The 107th is too long, too rambling to be published. So now I am reading through it, marking it with more red ink than I ever imagined. And the words are there – there are too many of them – but they are there. The connections are not clear enough, not yet. The hints are too bold, the foreshadowing too vague. Of the 123,000 + words, only 2091 are ‘and’ with 71 occurrences of ‘just’, which means that the cuts will be more extensive than only getting rid of the extra words.
So, back to the re-reading, the inking of the pretty pages. Back to eradicating the devils from my manuscript.
Barnesversation 