So a few weeks ago my editor asked me to shorten WLP again, and I’ve finally cleared some time in my schedule to work on it. It’s not going to be an easy task, as I tightened it up quite a bit this summer and there isn’t anything obvious to yank out.
There was always something not quite right about one of my plot threads, so this morning I tried something unusual. Basically, I pulled out all the text in which two of my characters appear, Gek-Lin and Uncle Charley, and I looked at the thread without any of the surrounding material.
It was a pretty cool process. I could immediately see flaws that I thought might be there but that I hadn’t been able to get at when there were 100 pages between them. Anyway, was able to tighten things up a little between the characters this way. Should be able to pull out a little more tomorrow.