Today's happenings

Today was a decent day for editing. Managed to shave my word count down by a small amount and, most importantly, I rewrote a stale scene while still managing to cut words. 

It's a sour feeling every time I come up to scene that's a little lackluster. My whole point right now is to cut those words, but rewrites invariably seem to mean adding words. I'll read and re-read the same scene, trying to figure out what the essence of the story is. I'll mull it around in my brain over and over trying to figure out what's important, what I need to make sure is in there, and then the long process of rewriting begins. 

I've been fortunate enough to have a net loss of words, but it's still not enough. I'm hoping that I can go through on a strictly word cutting edit next and take out a ton of little words. If you didn't know, you can get a decent chunk removed by cutting very specific words that ad nothing to the plot. "That," "really," "very," "just," and so many more little words don't add to your novel and can be removed. In a 140k word manuscript, taking all of them out can have an amazing outcome.

On a different note, it's about time to start getting people together for my next beta read. I've been fortunate enough to get a few good people together for my last reading group, but as I near completion of this edit, I'll need people to read the whole thing. So... if you're interesting, I have a form on the contact page, but you can also hit me up in the comments here or on social media. 

DFTBA