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This being what I pulled off in editing land last night before I went to bed, too bleary to bother to make a post. I knocked a couple hundred more words out of Chapter 22, and started putting a dent in 23; all in all, a decent night’s work!

As expected, I was able to tighten up the entire sequence where Julian and Faanshi and the elves break into the abbey; I think that bit alone was good for a thousand words or so. I sacrificed some decent enough descriptions, but in the name of brevity and pacing, this close to the end, I think it’s for the best.

Now into 23, which is the big climax where Super Annie appears to wreak havoc. Not sure yet how many more words I’ll be able to yoink out of here. But today, I shall give it a go. About 2,900 more words to go!

Edited last night: -330
Chapter 22 revised total: 3,931
Chapter 23 revised total: 5,060
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 119,414

I must have eaten my Editor Wheaties for breakfast this morning. (Which is funny, because I could have sworn I had a ham and cheese bagel sandwich.) I have just trimmed the hell out of Chapter 22, focusing on the sequence where Faanshi, Julian, and the elves scout out the abbey. I decided there was actually quite a bit of cruft verbiage there, and no real need to linger on describing ‘yeah, it’s twilight, the abbey’s busy having vespers, nobody’s out, they get to break into the postern gate because inexperienced Faanshi and one-handed Julian aren’t going to climb over a wall’. ‘Cause seriously, the good stuff? That’s getting them inside to Kestar.

Anyway, I am suddenly quite a bit closer to the 20K goal after all, and Chapter 22 has had about 1,100 words yoinked out of it. Here are last night’s and tonight’s stats.

Edited last night: -314
Edited tonight: -902
Chapter 22 revised total: 4,144
Chapter 23 revised total: 5,177
Chapter 24 revised total: 6,593
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 119,744

So I started into more of Chapter 22 tonight, only to discover that actually, re-reading it, I’m pretty happy with the bulk of it. I’ve only succeeded in taking out another 110 or so words tonight.

I therefore went on through Chapter 23 and Chapter 24, and came to much the same conclusion. I’m really rather lacking on too many extraneous words in these chapters. I’m going to make another pass through both of them over the next few nights, but it’s seeming like I may be closer to the end of this draft than I thought. I may not quite hit the 20K, but if I can pull the total word count down under 120K, I think I’ll be happy with that.

Stay tuned for further details. I’ll post an actual number update tomorrow night.

Chapter 22 edits are now underway, and I’ve taken out nearly 170 words. Very close to dipping down under the 120K mark, which is a nice milestone to have so near. I’m pretty sure I won’t need to do anything but word count reduction here–and I’m thinking that the whole sequence where Faanshi, Julian, and the elves break into the abbey can be tightened significantly. Don’t know if I’ll be able to hit a full K out of this chapter, but I’ll give it a college try.

Stopping reasonably early tonight though on account of trying to get caught up on sleep. Better for the writing braincells thattaway.

Edited tonight: -168
Chapter 22 revised total: 5,156
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 120,960

I have successfully beaten 1,000 words out of Chapter 21! And man, this entire chapter was an exercise in asking myself really difficult questions about whether many sentences if not entire paragraphs really, really needed to be there.

I think I’ll call it a wrap on this chapter then, and move on to Chapter 22 tomorrow night. By my running tally I need to kill about another 4,600 words but I’ll be happy with a rough estimate of 4K.

Three chapters to go and the epilogue. I’m getting there.

Edited tonight: -91
Chapter 21 revised total: 5,891
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,128

Yeah yeah yeah I know, technically this is supposed to be Day 4. But mamishka had a birthday dinner last night, and by the time I got home I was too full of tasty food and b00zah0l to muster enough brain for editing, what can I say?

So I edited today instead, and succeeded in beating Chapter 21 down under 6,000 words. I’ve killed about 900 words in it all told, and could probably stand to kill another hundred to be on track with the goal of reading 117K by the end of the book. I will therefore see if I can kill another hundred in it tomorrow before I move on to Chapter 22!

Edited today and tonight: -242
Chapter 21 revised total: 5,982
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,219

I think last night’s estimate was about right: turns out I killed 260 words out of Chapter 21 tonight. The page count is down to 26, but the 26th page is really only half a page, and with judicious pruning I might be able to kill the rest of that page too. We’ll see tomorrow night.

In addition to just general verbiage reduction, I found at least a couple more places where I could eliminate sentences that were not absolutely critical to the action. It’ll be amusing to me at some point to compare my style in the first draft of this thing with my style in the fourth.

Edited tonight: -260
Chapter 21 revised total: 6,224
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,461

About 200 words tonight killed in Chapter 21. Page count of that chapter went down another page from 28 to 27. Biggest edit: deleted an entire paragraph in which I rather fancied the imagery but in which I had to make myself realize that actually, it didn’t really need to be there.

There’s another six pages or so that I haven’t scanned through yet in this chapter, and I don’t know yet what this means in terms of how many more words I’ll be able to kill from it. Another couple of hundred, if I’m lucky; a net loss of 600 or so on the chapter feels kind of light to get me to the goal, though.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

Edited tonight: -204
Chapter 21 revised total: 6,484
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,721

… I emailed agent Diana Fox, who y’all may remember I last approached this past fall regarding Lament, to ask her whether it’s still okay for me to submit the revised version of the manuscript to her for consideration. She says yes.

This means I am now setting myself the goal to not only finish the edit pass on the fourth draft but also get it beta-read before solarbird, spazzkat, and I head to Disneyland on the 9th. I have four more chapters and an epilogue to finish editing, and thankfully at this point, I think I’ve passed all the bits that need major surgery. So it should be down to a question of word count reduction.

Y’all consider this an early warning then that I’m going to need a beta reader or three to sanity-check this thing for me before I fire it off at Ms. Fox. The level of effort required here would simply be to read over the manuscript and make sure it hangs together coherently–since I’ll have killed 20,000 words out of it, and in some places significantly tweaked events, I’ll need to make sure all of these changes have made it an overall leaner and meaner story. Significant tweaking in particular has been done with Faanshi’s portrayal, trying to strengthen her as a character, and I need to make sure that works too.

General proofreading will also be welcome but not required.

So if anybody thinks they may have free cycles in the week or so before July 9th and will have time to chug through about 117K worth of novel, let me know!