I hope this is getting better, because it's not always shorter
Been revising all day. I took chapters 5 through...8? Maybe? (lost track) and tore them apart and rewrote them and cut paragraphs and words and then wrote some entirely new scenes in which:
- we actually meet Katrin and Marta properly instead of their just kind of being there until I needed them
- Bettine learns to thread a needle lefthanded in real time, so to speak, with frustration and stubborn persistence
- the stitches come out of her hand and she learns a flexibility exercise
- there are yummy fruit buns
So it's actually 300 words longer than it was this morning, which is the wrong direction, but on the other hand I already lost 1,500ish words on the last two chapters so maybe it's not fatal. I think this is all better, and there is less narration of the "weeks passed, and blah blah blah" variety. But I'm not really sure because I have no perspective right now. Hope I haven't cut anything that was really good (was anyone attached to the smelly bathroom??), but I doubt it.
But argh, this means I need to find other places in the book to cut so I can bring down that word count. So I am hoping, hoping that there is flab in there somewhere, and that I will recognize it when I reread.
- we actually meet Katrin and Marta properly instead of their just kind of being there until I needed them
- Bettine learns to thread a needle lefthanded in real time, so to speak, with frustration and stubborn persistence
- the stitches come out of her hand and she learns a flexibility exercise
- there are yummy fruit buns
So it's actually 300 words longer than it was this morning, which is the wrong direction, but on the other hand I already lost 1,500ish words on the last two chapters so maybe it's not fatal. I think this is all better, and there is less narration of the "weeks passed, and blah blah blah" variety. But I'm not really sure because I have no perspective right now. Hope I haven't cut anything that was really good (was anyone attached to the smelly bathroom??), but I doubt it.
But argh, this means I need to find other places in the book to cut so I can bring down that word count. So I am hoping, hoping that there is flab in there somewhere, and that I will recognize it when I reread.