Chopping away
Several people who have read the prologue of my novel have felt that it was too long, and that the action sequences were too detailed. It was originally 7400 words. I had trimmed it down to 7200 with some minor tweaks. But today I took an axe to it. (Of course, to cut it substantially, I had to do quite a bit of rewriting as well.) But it now stands at 3500 words — 47% of the original word count. That’s slightly more, percentagewise, than I cut my short story “Upgrade” before selling it to Analog. Obviously that worked for “Upgrade.” I’m still undecided if the drastically shorter prologue is better.
And speaking of “Upgrade,” I think I’m going to make that story available in honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.
So, how does it look now? Is it up on the same page? I didn\’t notice any changes at the hotl page.
The old private page for viewing the novel as I was writing it has not been updated in a long time. I’ve made a lot of changes since then, most of them fairly minor. This revision of the prologue is the most extensive change.