I spent my evening hunting around for tips on first-draft editing, and found some stuff – mostly blog posts – that I think will be really helpful. Whereas I’ve been approaching revision with a sense of dread, now I was getting excited about it. So, yay about that.
Then a search engine result caught my eye and I clicked it. It was about standard word counts for various genres of novels. Whether you call what I’m doing urban fantasy or paranormal romance, the standard for both is apparently 90,000-100,000 words. Deviating from the standard can equal automatic rejection for unpublished authors (and I’m assuming I’m considered unpublished because I’ve never published fiction, only journalism).
I’m sitting at 88,000 and am nowhere close to the end.
So now I’m not all that excited about revising anymore. Because chances are good I’m going to be looking to cut around 20,000+ words.
I’m fucked.