Today I wield THE KNIFE

Or, really, the red pen...

So, this was the problem: I had a book. And the first third of said book was about one and a half times as long as the second part of said book, and about twice as long as the third part of said book.

Also?

Parts of it were really, really, really boring.

In came the red pen.

For this surgical procedure, I needed to do several things:

1. Go through the first part and decided what was absolutely ESSENTIAL for driving the plot forward (remembering that I can TRUST my readers, and they have pretty awesome brains and instincts and intuitions without me to help them along)

2. Re-ordering certain scenes in the book to make them more efficient (this was a slight bother, since I had already put all my date indexes into the scenes all nice and pretty and in order, but c'est la vie! Totally worth it.)

3. Putting the scenes into a new Word .doc to prevent a huge, messy, spagettified muddle

4. Reading over part 1 in its new incarnation and seeing if it makes sense. (It does, thankfully)

5. BUT. It was still a little slow in parts, which means MORE CUTTING

The weird thing is, I actually LOVE doing this. This surgical, technical part of creating a book. The part that is invisible to most readers (as it should be). I know that every hour I spend getting this perfect is an hour well spent. Because, at the end of the day, I want to write a GOOD book, not just any old book.

And, when you read it, I want you to really love it, and slip along with the story, not be bogged down by endless narration that doesn't need to be there.

So, guys, this is for you. A day of manuscript surgery. And I'm loving every minute!