Accepting and Rejecting Suggestions

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If you follow me, you know I'm working on a deadline with my book, Thread of Evidence. I never know what a day will bring when I open the book and start working on it. At one point the editor wanted to delete an entire chapter, considered two of them, but only trimmed the second. Not happening. The chapter in question is one of the most important and pivotal chapters in the book and she wanted to delete it. I don't know her reasons, except as she pointed out at the beginning of this project, she was cutting for word count. You might not be aware, and I certainly wasn't before I contracted with my publisher, that her standard word count per book is 50-90 thousand words. You might recall my book is much larger than that. When I edited it the first time, I started with 203K words and worked it down to 185K I think. Her cuttings took it down to 98K. You can imagine she cut the heart and soul out of my book to lose half of it like that. Today, I start work on chapter 23 of 53 chapters. Only 30 to go. It's going far better than I expected. There's still a lot I'm rejecting, but even with what I've accepted so far, my word count now stands at 164,451. I'm also down 50 pages. It will be interesting to see where the word count will be when I finish this before May first. I know most publishers don't like to publish bigger than 125K for first-time authors, which is what I am to the publishing world. My previously published books were self-published. This is my first book contract. With 30 chapters to go, I wonder if I will have 125K when all is said and done. I'm not pushing on word count. If I was, I would accept all her suggestions and the book would be crap and I wouldn't promote it. However, the way it stands now, it's starting to blossom and will be a wonderful book when finished. I will say, I'm learning a lot in this editing process. Things, I never noticed before, I'm seeing more clearly. I'm also paying more attention to shows, and movies I watch, looking for details, especially in movies I've seen before. I watched a good one on Saturday, Rip Tide at my friend down the hall's apartment. In my defense, I wouldn't have watched it on my own as I don't watch that genre very often. Romance, though I'm not sure it really falls in that category, isn't something I tolerate well. Anyway, I paid attention to details in the movie and how the human factor was more than just a cut and dried stick to the plan, story. There's a lot more to a good story than what people think. When you pick up a book to read it or sit down to watch a show, you don't concern yourself with all the hidden details. However, when you sit down to write a review on it, you pick up on the human factor in the story, and how well it all flows together. That is what I'm hoping to achieve with Thread of Evidence. So far, I believe I have and it's coming together well. Time to start work. It's been a good morning here. I don't know if I'll be back today. I want to get more done than I did yesterday, which was three chapters. I don't have anything else to do today, and couldn't anyway as I don't have a working vehicle until sometime this week. More on that in another post. How is your day going? Thanks for reading.