Preparing to Edit a Novel
It's that time of year again. All the mistletoe has rotted and half of everyone's New Year resolutions have already been thrown out the window. That first draft of your Nano--or whatever other project you've been ignoring for the last several months--has been sitting in its corner quietly collecting dust for long enough. It's time to pull that tome out and edit. It will be painful, it might be bloody--though I suspect you'll go through more ink than actual blood--but it's necessary. Trust me, your novel will look better without all those tangents and ten page character descriptions. They are extra limbs just getting in the way--I mean, spiders have eight legs but if a human had eight arms that would just be awkward, right? Think of limbs as sub-plots…