Working on the first story, a selection from Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and it’s ugly going. I started out with a 4,500-word piece and instructions to cut it to no more than 1,500 words, and cutting it to a thousand would probably be better. So far I’ve gotten it down to 2,131 and finding things to cut, summarize, or rewrite is getting harder and harder. What I’m going to do when I have to reduce Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” 9,800 words long, to no more than 1,575, I don’t know.
(ETA 15:00: I got it down to 1,552 words, signed off and sent it to my editor. I expect feedback from her sometime tomorrow, or maybe the next day if she’s busy.)
