Paksworld

All the detached chapters and sections are back in the main file, and everything’s renumbered.   (This doesn’t mean I’ve renumbered everything correctly, judging by past experience!)   I’m now at least 9000 words over my planned  length, so the afternoon (of a beautiful day, alas) will be spent in both patching and cutting.  

Some of the cutting is fairly obvious, now that I’ve got the added sections printed out to compare…when the same person says the same things to the same other person in two different conversations ten chapters apart…that requires a fix.    Some of the cutting is much less obvious (though I just found a half dozen sentences that could each lose 1-3 words without harm–I’m not even down to the “the-cut” stuff yet.

At least the monster didn’t go over 180K, which I’d been afraid of (but that was because there were two identical chapters where I added in a new version and forgot to delete the old.)   It’s over 178K though.   All the additional material is solid enrichment–characterization/plot combos–so except for the duplications, it all stays in.  Out can come anything that conflicts with the new material, and anything that isn’t tightly integrated.   Because I was well within my length, I had not yet done much trimming at all, so I know there are ways to get it down…though doing it as fast as I need to do it is going to mean slogging through the weekend, all weekend.

Meanwhile, the beef stock in progress is beginning to smell really, really good.   I hope you’re all having a fun/relaxing/exciting/enjoyable first day of 2010.