I'm killing my lovelies. Taking a meandering over 100k manuscript and cutting and chopping, carefully picking and pruning to turn it into a 90k-95k novel that actually has a time line that makes sense. I am also being careful to cut out parts that elude to another book and give away the story in that book.
It's really quite challenging to do. I encourage everyone who hasn't done it to try. As I work, I'm more and more in awe of people who did this stuff before the day of computers. The cut and copy and paste features have made whomever came up with them my new hero. I can't wrap my head around the tedium it must have been to try to do it on paper, and ONLY on paper. I know there are some that still map out and do their rough drafts longhand, but wow. I know I couldn't do a whole book in its entirety by hand.
So here's a hat tip to those who came before me and my generation of writers. To the real wordsmiths, the real craft masters, who toiled in bad lighting and risking paper-cuts to bring some few hours of happiness and escape from the dreary real world around us.
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