Revision 3
Just this morning, I finished Revision 3 of The Gatherer. This is such an accomplishment, on so many levels! The original word count was 409, 113. E, bless her, has read every single one of those words more than once. She's a major fan of this story. And that's a lot of words. My goal was to reduce it to under 300,000. Well, my real goal in editing was to tell the story without any redundancies, verbosities, unnecessary repetition, or wordiness in general. (In other words, my aim was to make it the exact opposite of that previous sentence, did you catch my joke?) And in the process, I hoped to reduce it to under 300,000 words—which was a lofty goal, considering that was a reduction of over 25%. I am very happy with the results. I feel that I did, indeed, tell the story in the best way I know how. I streamlined the text and took my expression to a higher level of efficiency and elegance. I cut out scenes that were unnecessary back story that the reader doesn't need. I cut o