So. Many. Words.

My book has too many words.

I think I mentioned that I turned Lulu’s adventure last fall into a children’s chapter book, didn’t I? I can’t find the post where I did. Hopefully I mentioned that I finished it. Sort of…

But it has WAAAY too many words. How can that be? Right? Words are good. Right? Except when you’re writing for young readers. You know.

And all those words? They’re intimidating! Especially when they’re all gathered together into one 62 page (!) document. It’s double spaced with annotations, but still. SIXTY-TWO PAGES! 17,386 words!!

You are going to be unimpressed with my solution to the problem of feeling overwhelmed by the word count. I have… and don’t say anything if this was obvious to you – I’m still recovering from the forced hiatus that was summer vacation… I have discovered that the best way to cut down the word count is to copy each paragraph, one at a time, into a blank document and edit it by itself and then copy it back into the original document. It feels way less immense to do it that way.

And then, once I’ve compressed each paragraph into something vastly more readable, then I can go back and make it all interesting.

I am hoping to have the first 3 chapters done by mid October so I can read them to Lulu’s class. Her teacher was intrigued when I mentioned my project. It would be fun to have a captive audience!