A Diet for a Novel

I've been editing my NaNo "novel", which mostly consists of trimming
and tightening. I put novel in scare quotes because it's really on the
first section of the novel.

A lot of cellulite is landing on the cutting room floor. (If only it
were as easy to shed pounds as to shed excess novel weight!) My hard-
won 50,000 words is now down to about 16,500. (This is because for
NaNo, when I re-wrote a chapter over with different scenes, I just
included all of the versions in my word count, but now I am discarding
the lame early mis-starts.)

There are also a few scenes that need filling out. (In my NaNo
original, I just wrote "Insert some sort of cool kung-fu fight here.")
I expect the whole section to be about 18,000 words when finished.
This is good, because it's just the first 1/5 of the book. If each
section is about 18,000 words, the final book will be about 90,000
words. I hope that's not too long for YA novel, if indeed this book
*is* a YA novel.

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