Word count marathon, day 2

Starting word count: 248,678

Ending word count after revising Chapters 5 through 8, 27 through 29: 244,962

# words cut: 3,716

More progress, though not anywhere close to where I need to be by now. And I realized today that the there wll be a law of diminishing returns, in that my calculations assumed yesterday that I could sustain deleting an average of 625 words per chapter. The reality is that isn’t sustainable, something I realized when two of my chapters had hardly anything I could cut.

Then again, Chapters 1 through 28 had been pretty well picked over before I started this mad dash of revision; Cat has assiduously applied her editing expertise and kung-fu to all of those chapters, and then I’ve made additional edits to them as I incorporated her changes into the finished draft. Which means there actually is quite a bit that can be cut from the chapters that haven’t yet received that attention, just from that process. The problem, of course, is that it won’t be possible to perform that kind of editorial review before Friday.

Which…it’s my pitch paragraph that needs to be turned in by Friday, not my entire ms. BUT! I’ll need to include my word count with my submission, and even if it’s finalized, I’d really like to have that number much closer to 200,000 than it is right now. On the other hand, I don’t want to get too frenzied or I’m liable to either A) cut injudiciously, or B) add errors instead of removing them. Because the fact remains that I’m merely submitting my pitch for critique and it won’t elicit anything more than that feedback. I’m essentially trying to get ready for a wedding when the guy (or in this case, girl) hasn’t even proposed!

I can’t help but be reminded of the J. Walter Weatherman “lessons” George Bluth taught his kids on Arrested Development. Instead of “And THAT’S why you always leave a note!”, it would be “And THAT’S why you always have your manuscript ready for submission!”