The first task was obvious once I stood back and looked at the pile of paper on my desk. A 1,500 page manuscript would probably translate into a book of more than 800 or 900 pages in length. Even though I had edited every page and chapter as I went along, there simply had been no way to be sure how the book would come together until everything was written, until I finally had a narrative to read through. The next day, I delivered the manuscript to my editor. I needed to cut at least 300 pages from the manuscript.
Some writers seem to struggle cutting their own words.
As anyone reading these missives for DFBL knows by now, I do tend to go on and on. Even after a first edit, there are always plenty of words ripe for savaging. So, the first thing I needed to do was, with as detached an eye as I could muster, read through the entire book. Whole scenes ended up in the waste can, simply because my mind had wandered. Often, that works in newspaper stories, where the goal is to convey information.