Black and White and Red All Over

So Book #4 is in the hands of my agent. I celebrated by patting myself on the back, then dived back into the thick of it. I'd like to say I'm already half way done with Book #5. I'd like to have started Book #5. I'd like to know what Book #5 is.

The reality is that I'm actually back into Book #3. As soon as I sent Book #3 off to my agent, I started working on #4. When I received the notes back for #3, I was well into #4 and just plowed ahead and finished it.

Now I get to address the corrections for #3.

Confused yet?

Here's the blunt of it: I'm editing Book #3. Editing is fun. Sort of like sharpening a stick and jabbing it into your eyeball.

The biggest challenge is going to be chopping out over 10,000 words of the book. Currently it is bursting the seams at 107,000K. It would be ideal to bring it down to something between 80K and 90K. I'm not sure that's going to happen, but I'm going to do my darndest to get it under 100K.

You know, you pour yourself into every word you write. Every scene, every moment. It's all you.

Then you have to kill it.

Off with his head!

Oh yeah, big books get published all the time. Much bigger than 107,000 words. But I'm not JK Rowling or Stephen King. I don't have ten bazillion readers willing to pay forty bucks for my next boat anchor. I'm the new kid on the block.

Publishers are looking at me and coming up with every reason they can to not publish me. They see 107,000K and the finance department is going crazy with their calculators. It's going to cost this much to produce that book, and it would cost this much if the book was shorter, and this is the new kid on the block, and we don't even know if anybody is going to buy a single copy, and we could really use a new coffee maker downstairs, and don't forget that I haven't gone on vacation for three years.

Off with his head!

Where do you start when you have to shave 10K off your baby? I'm not one for writing fluff to begin with, so it's not like I can go in and cut all the adverbs and mile long descriptions of the sunset--there aren't any to cut.

Sigh.

This is the life of a writer. You create a baby. You have to pull out the meat cleaver and make him shorter so somebody will love him.

Isn't that disgusting?