The Long and Winding Road...

Today my husband commented that his emails were always too long but he couldn't work out how to fix the issue. I said he'd know he really had a problem when he set out to write 30,000 words and ended up with 120,000 or so. That's happened to me twice recently, and I also wound up with 80,000 plus when I was thinking of about 20,000. The problem isn't rambling or waffling or even padding; it's more that a story is like a snowball. As it runs down the slope, it gathers more and more snow unto itself. It's also something like a tree. It might start as a sapling with three branches and a twig, but it ends up as a blessed oak.

What to do? Two companies I write for have the perfect solution; break the overlength ms into two or three parts, and publish each as a separate book. This means doing a little rewriting to give a soft entry into Parts Two and Three, but it's doable. It's much easier than trying to cut the ms back by two-thirds.