Stripping the Work Down to Basics

So I have actually been thinking about Book #3 quite a bit lately. (I know. I know. I said I wouldn’t work on anything until Looking for Home sold. I also reserved the right to change my mind.)

On Friday night while I was out of town, I remembered one of the guiding principles I used when revising Hurricane Baby–cut all the boring parts! For this rough draft, I figured out that meant to cut every part of the book where the two main characters weren’t directly interacting with each other.

Well.

I set to doing that this afternoon after we got back from the conference.

And that process cut the manuscript from 321 pages to 115.

Yikes.

While doing it, I realized that much of what I was cutting was extremely wordy setup for the next interactions between these two main characters. I was using a lot of words/dialogue/description/character thoughts to explain everything that was happening behind the scenes–then summarizing all that action in the next encounter between these two main characters.

So. What’s next?

I’m going to let it sit for a week or so–until April 1. Then I’m going to go back and re-read the stripped-down version, looking for what may need to be done to further develop their relationship. Because their relationship is where the heat is, the smoke. The action.

So we will see what happens.