Y’all know how I mentioned the scene at the beginning of Chapter 15 was destined to die? Well, I killed it–and added in a bit of extra content in the new first scene of the chapter, tying a bit more in to how the previous one closed. This means that all told I’ve killed nearly 2,000 words from this one chapter alone.

And that’ll do me for now with this chapter, I think. I’ll be moving on to Chapter 16 as of tomorrow night to see what I can do to it. Now I’m moving out of the rough middle stretch into where the editor was saying the pacing started working better for her, but I’m still on the Word Count Reduction mission. So we’ll see how many more words I can kill in the remaining chapters. (Of which there are nine, since I’ll also be punting the epilogue over into the second book.)

As of tonight’s efforts I’ve killed 7,346 words total from the draft, and of the words killed, big chunks of them were in that one scene in this very chapter. (As well as shorter interstitial sorts of scenes in the last couple ones as well.) The total word count is down to 111,012. I think I’m on good track to kill 10K total out of this draft, which is smack dab in the target range.

This does not suck.