do you hear the words that are coming out of my mouth

There's always more to pare away.

Hours and hours of editing today, and I'm starting to think I'll never be done.

This is the long, hard slog; the story is finished, the re-writing done. Now all that's left is making the manuscript beautiful.

But everything can always be *more* beautiful, can't it? How do you know when it's lovely enough?

When it stops sounding like speech, and starts sounding like Gertrude Stein. I love the woman, but I don't think an entire book of diamond-sharp sentence fragments would fly. And if you leech all the humanity from a manuscript, why would humans read it? So, I'm polishing until:

1. The action is easy to follow
2. I don't repeat words, and use names as little as possible.
3. The pacing feels right
4. I say all I need to say
5. And no more.

When I've done all I can think of, I make sure I don't have:

1. The same sentence structure too often
2. Too many prepositions
3. Any adverbs
4. Extraneous ANYTHING (sentences and paragraphs, as well as words)

I tend to linger over passages for too long: if it ain't broke... well, I'm no quitter! So, after I've gone through my lists (which usually takes 2-5 days of editing/5-10 pages), I move on-- no exceptions.

Problem is: this week, I'm sending out my first queries. All of which require a writing sample. So I've gone over my first five pages AD NAUSEUM, and-- for once and all-- come to the absolute limit of my abilities. But now I wonder: what about those hundreds of "edited" pages that I haven't given the first five's treatment to?

As Anakin Skywalker would say: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!