2 down…
Posted by rwday on February 24, 2009
2 chapters in the can. I cut about 1,000 words altogether, so a reduction of about 10%. My goal is to get the manuscript down at least 25%, so that’s not much of a start. I comfort myself by saying that I need to keep a lot of the beginning in, as I think it’s important, when working with later books in a series, to give enough explanation so readers who haven’t read the first book can still figure what’s going on.
It’s a fine balance, though, between the completely incomprehensible to 7 books full of ‘Harry Potter wasn’t an ordinary boy…’ Yes, Jo, we know. By Order of the Phoenix, I’m pretty sure everybody, including hermits living at the top of impossibly high mountains in Nepal, knew that Harry Potter was a wizard. But as I haven’t quite had the popularity of JK Rowling, I’m trying to explain things fully without being pedantic. Not easy, especially as pedantic is my standard operating mode these days, thanks to grad school.
