More cutting

It's getting to be a bloody mess here in the editing suite. While more cutting has taken place, I've come to the conclusion that huge swaths of text are going to have to go before I'm done. I'm thinking that about 70 pages will be excised from the final draft of Godsend. And while I lament the loss, I do feel a little invigorated about the prospect of doing it. There will be some re-writing, but the novel will be tighter, and more realistic in a lot of ways. It's something that should have happened before. Once I get all the re-writes done this time, I'm going to re-submit to several agencies that expressed some interest before.

Someone asked on a message board about killing your darlings, which, for the uninitiated, means cutting sentences, characters, subplots, etc., that you really love from your work. A lot of people have a hard time doing this. But I really don't. If I'm so into a sentence, I keep it for future use. If I like a character, I'll place them somewhere else.

In this case, though, I don't think these pages will find their way into another story. They will be cut away, and will survive for historians to peruse when I'm gone.