killing darlings :(

I really hate it when you have an excellent chapter that really conveys the setting, enhanced by personal experience and sensory detail, that is fairly well-written, and that is different from the common scenarios found in other such books--and you realize that it all has to go. That you can nestle the relevant details in a few lines here and there in other chapters, that you can collapse two characters into one, and that you will lose a whole lotta words. But only at the expense of this chapter that you have come to love.

Alas, here comes the scalpel...

It is done...

...and the ms is 3100 words skinnier. I've gotten through about the first third of the book since I started this revision round, and lost about 7500 words total so far. Not bad, eh?

Of course, then there's the growing mess at the end that directly correlates to the more you tear up at the beginning. Unwriting is so much harder than writing.

It would be nice to get the next section organized, if only in my head, before I put it up for the night. Alas, PMB went to bed around 11 last night, had to get up at 7 this morning because we did have school, and has not taken a nap today. And it's ten pm.

Meanwhile, his parents are about to start drooling and blibbering form lack of sleep. I think I will have to call it a night or risk aliens landing in chapter 14.