I've done it. I'd give in to my baser desires and unleash the mad scientist evil laughter here--it really does sound like Daffy Duck--but I'm at an evil scientist convention.
I have, however, completed a round of edits on my WIP, and I'm astonished at myself. I've already edited this piece a number of times (four to be exact), but this is the first edit that really improved the prose. And that's what this one was, an edit to take out the bad words (See George Carlan's skits for more on bad words), passive verbs, and awkwardness in general. The amazing thing for me is that without changing any of the scenes, barely tweaking the flow of information, I found 10,000 extraneous, useless, and other wise redundant words (Yes, I am a card carrying member of the the Redundancy Department of Redundancy, why do you ask?).
Ten thousand. That's a whole ton of was/were/had/have/been/would/could/that. In fact, that was a full tenth of the novel. Okay, to be fair, I cut a lot of adjectives and adverbs to (how many times can I use beautiful? don't I have any other words?), but still, ten thousand words is a lot. Also on the chopping block was my personal favorite line from the book, but it had to go because it was actually out of character (and a little too mean).
So, one more read through for typos and flow, and I'm golden...
Right?
Just checking in to see how it's coming along. I don't need to send a search party out into Revision Hell, do I?
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