Seconded. So happy for you, Hathor. Especially about the word count.
Yeah, the hardest was waiting after the MRI for a time the doctor would look at the results.
Now I can hit up my husband for a favor at will. I've already asked him, "How much is it worth to you for me not to call your mom and tell her the good news about not having a brain tumor?" He responded, "Uh...what do you want? No, really." (Of course, he hadn't told her about the slight possibility. She would have gone nuts.)
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Word count looking good. This is -- ta da -- 30,000 from the draft I last queried. (Which was 20,000 down from the draft I first queried. An agent had said, "I'll look at it if you bring it down to 110,000 and change the footnotes to endnotes." I did, but she didn't. I thanked her anyway because the book was better.)
It wasn't just my own bloviating I took out. I've converted the book to be more tightly focused on my story, bringing in only the law and science necessary to understand it. I dropped all the general "here's what you need to know to deal with the school system" or extended policy discussions of what should change. The first is available in other books. As for the second... It's hard for me to accept but far more people are persuaded by stories than by citation of evidence or logical argument.
I actually tucked in a lot more little anecdotes or details, which was harder than cutting entire paragraghs or sections. A bunch of things happened to my family -- turning that into a coherent story line is the trick. I still have some cute stories, but haven't figured out how they would advance the narrative any.
I still need to comb through this thing line by line. I've done the big cuts and reorganized. I hit the excess wordiness by my standard use of "find" (-ly, very, that, etc.) and anything that jumped out at me. But there's still stuff in there, I'm sure. Yesterday I saw a sentence that made me cringe. I'm glad it was so far in the book I'm sure no agent ever saw it.
You know, maybe all that rejection I experienced was for the best. Now there is a nice, odd-numbered-day rationalization for you
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Once again, I have baseball tickets when the Caps are having a playoff game. A fortuitous rain delay would be best. And no triple overtime loss, of course. I have no fingernails left after that last game.
If I had a New Jersey Devils shirt, I'd wear it today. We're playing the Phillies so their fans will be invading our stadium the way they always do. However, this year the team announced an "Our Park" initiative for this weekend. It's going to be crowded and loud. Too bad we aren't playing the Flyers, instead. That would be even wilder.