I spent yesterday playing slice and dice with the next overgrown sasquatch-chapter of the manuscript I’ve been revising. 40 pages going in, and probably right around thirty by the time I decided it would just be easier to rewrite the whole thing. There are just too many pieces, people! I think I’d collected every single unanchored question in the entire book, and thrown it into the interrogation scene. And some of them aren’t very interrogation-y questions. And there’s this really random character (who I love) in the middle of it, telling them how to work a bathtub.

Well, he’s a retired college professor. They’re just going to do things like that, from time to time, and you can’t stop them.

I’m caught somewhere between But I don’t want to cut the retired college professor!!! And So… uhm… why is there a college professor in the first place?

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I did most of the cuts at a table filled with chatty co-workers, so I’d be able to cut with one hand and gossip with the other. You know… keeps your mind off the cutting, so (hopefully) you don’t notice that you’re about to remove the last good bathtub explanation scene.

I wound up talking about how to sell a short story. Where to find addresses to send it to. And maybe the truth is that there are plenty of writers floating around my small town, and that they just don’t know how to take the next step.

Maybe they just need to be wrangled into the library for a writers’ group, and maybe… if I were more social, more organize-y they’d already be there.