The numbers thus far

[desperance]

Lawks. I've finished editing/redrafting/revising/rewriting (however you like to look at it; I think editing is probably closest) the first three of four parts to "River of the World", and thus far I have cut 27,304 words out of 110,001. Which, your arithmetical minds will tell you, is damn' near a quarter. To be precise, it's 24.8%.

Sheesh. Either it was deeply seriously flabby before, or I have been hacking away good sweet flesh just to get the pagecount down, and the residue will be bone-bare and unlovely. Who can tell?

I still have the longest section to go, another 80,000 words, more or less, and I expect to find fewer to cut. Indeed, so many have gone already, I've almost lost my incisive impetus: as though I've done the tough-love thing, and can give the little darling some leeway now. Tut. Discipline endures. See discipline endure...

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Nay, never! They did this to 'The Stand', as you say, and to Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land', both books I was very fond of at the time, and I leaped on these new engorged versions with glee, and never made it to the end of either one of them, and haven't read even the original versions since.

It was partly that I just found them overlong, but more than that, they were no longer the books I knew. I'm terribly conservative that way; if I'm rereading, I want to be rereading the same text, not bits I recognise and bits I don't. It's like translations: I have a new copy of 'The Count of Monte Cristo', a book I adore, and I can't read this because it's a new translation, which means that the story may be the same but none of its words are the right words. And then - as you know - I don't want to buy a DVD with three different versions of the same film on it; I want one authoritative version of my artwork, or the foundations of my world are all atremble...