I finished editing my book for repetitions. I'm excited to get it typed up and see how many words I was able to cut. I'm betting it's down to 30,000 words. The story gets tighter with each revison.
One thing I notice though, is that I seem to make fewer and fewer changes as I go along. I think I just poop out and let things slide that I woul dhave nit-picked earlier. This concerns me. It also tells me that I'm reaching a place where I need professional help, and no I don't mean Psychiatry, although...
I picked up a few more editing books, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules among them. What a crack up. I was going to take it into the gym and read it on the treadmill. I'm glad I skimmed it first, because the whole book took me less than 20 minutes to read. Yet every word was dead on, including hooptedoodle. So I'm trying to follow Leonard's advice. The hardest one is getting rid of all exclamation points. He says you're allowed two for every 100,000 words, which means that I'm not even allowed one. Ha! That might be tough. But since punctuation is the bane of my existence to begin with, what did I expect.
The thing that is impossible is to not describe my characters. I could normally go along with this suggestion, wholeheartedly, and have at least one book in mind, where I will never give a physical description of any character. But for this book their physicality is essential to the story. They simply must be described. However, I do try to show the descriptions of the main characters instead of giving a "police blotter" summary.
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