It's a bloody mess over here! Yesterday my hubby and children let mommy hide in her cave the entire day. (Yes, they do love me.) So I decided to print out Chapter 1 and edit. Oh baby did I edit. I hacked away at that thing until all that remained were bloody stumps (translation: 5700 words to 2500). Then I tried to Frankenstein graft some of it back together and rearrange its parts until I made a pivotal decision, Chapter 1 must die. I made a ceremonial sacrifice, a necessary evil to my WIP because let's be honest, the story really doesn't get started until Chapter 2 and no one wants to read 5700 words of fluff.
Now those words are not a complete waste. There are a few key pieces that I need to weave in to Chapter 2, to help establish my MC (maybe 750 words of it). The rest we will call...“character development” and file it away as a healthy exercise.
I am off to carve into Chapter 2. Instead of going in with a machete, I plan to scale down to a butcher knife because we all know the beginning takes the most refinement. You can’t carve Mt. Rushmore with a butter knife.
When you first started reworking your WIP what major changes did you make?
