Not me, the book. As I mentioned in a previous post, the first draft topped out at over 138,000 words, which was about 20,000 more than I was expecting. Ever since, I have been editing to get rid of any bloat. And there was some. I still have around 150 pages to go and the total had dropped to just over 125,000 words. Don’t grieve for their loss. They should never have been in there in the first place. Believe me, the book is better off without them.
Now, however, it has risen to 128,000 words. Why? Because I wasn’t happy with one aspect of the plot. It needed improving, so I improved it. This involved rewriting several passages and adding a couple of new ones. That took me a couple of days. As I mentioned before, I still have 150 pages to go before completing the backwards pass, so the overall word count is likely to drop again, although not by much. The opening of the book has already been gone over many times and there isn’t much to excise from it.
When I finish this pass, which should be over the weekend, I turn to Grammarly to check the technical aspects of the work. Grammarly is primarily a grammar checker, but it also useful for weeding out niggly little errors thast you don’t notice when reading through, such as missing speech marks or double full stops. After that, it will be printed out again and off to my wife’s cousin for proofreading.
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