Now I'm Clicking Along...Backwards :)

Sometimes not writing words is a huge accomplishment. Sometimes the exact opposite is a major achievement. How can this be?

My (over-long for a first novel) 120,000+ word manuscript is now--ta daaaa!--106,700 words. It's been an epic slash-and-burn fest in the last week. I fired up the laze-saws and went to work with a vengence. I slashed entire scenes, re-arranged chapters, relocated sentences and dialogue to tighten up passages, and extricated anything that didn't absolutely have to be there. I rewrote one scene that lasted an entire chapter and changed elements that made it only about 1/3 of a chapter (700 words) in length.

So that's the good news. The bad? I still have over 7,000 words to burn. That translates to about three average chapters. ::: insert melting scream image here :::

Can it be done? Um, that's a definite maybe. I still have ten chapters that haven't been through the meatgrinder yet, so there could be more fodder for the Deleted Scenes files, but...I still have to write several new scenes. That concerns me. One step back, three steps forward, and in this case, I don't wanna go forward.

If any of you have been following Lisa Shearin's blog, you've been indoctrinated into the life of a writer (provided you aren't experiencing it first-hand :) ) It's a messy, convoluted process, with a lot of traffic jams and wrong turns. Even some trainwrecks. It's like taking a long roadtrip and trying to find your destination with just a few major landmarks in your head, and no roadmap to follow.

Ah, the creative process. Isn't it grand?