Post-Snow-Day Analysis

8,003/20,000 words for January.

2,215/3,000 words cut from Act I.

Snow day yesterday. The Husband went to work for a few hours, and then got an infusion in the afternoon, so it was just The Son and I stuck at home all day. We shoveled the walkway, played in the snow, made a truly fabulous art piece out of felt and sequins, and indulged in the time-honored snow day tradition of Too Much TV. It was hard to get much writing done; The Son is old enough to play independently, but young enough that "independently" sometimes means coming to ask me for something or tell me something every 2.12 minutes.

Despite all that, I managed to hit my word count for the day, and cut another ~200 words from Act I! I may have found a secret weapon in the battle to cut more words: I was browsing writing blogs and came across this mind-bogglingly helpful post on Kait Nolan's site, which includes a "scene questionnaire" to help you decide if the scene really belongs in the book. Now, I know all that stuff about GMC and MRU's and all that, but when I try to apply that knowledge to actual scenes in my actual book, it gets all muddled. But I started looking over Act I with Kait's questionnaire in front of me, and pretty quickly identified a scene that could be summarized instead. It was a brief scene, so it didn't gain (lose?) me that many words, but still. I am heartened. If I can do that 4 more times, I will have cut everything I need to and can just concentrate on moving forward.