I’m obsessed with my new alter ego, who I’ve come to call Bitchy Editor. I’ve asked her to step forward out of my subconscious and oversee the re-issue of my six novels. So far she’s sunk her teeth into this first book with a blood-thirsty zeal.

She pushed for want she wanted from the fine folks at Deranged Doctor Design, leaving me with a cover I love. Check it out.

Most of her efforts, though, have centered on giving the book itself what I thought was going to be a quick once over. You know, get rid of some of those lingering adverbs. Reduce the he saids, and make the he pondereds, he chuckleds and he exclaimeds go almost completely away.

She has been doing that, and found more than I expected, but that wasn’t enough. She’s decided to look at every sentence and demand to know what it is doing in my book. Does this matter? Who cares about this? Why is this in here?

But it shows my characters development. It’s so cute. I worked so hard on that paragraph. Bitchy Editor has little sympathy for any of that, and she wants me to stop starting so many sentences with but while I’m at it.

The result is I went from about 119,000 words down to 95,000 and it’s a better book. Maybe a little less charming here and there, but readers will never miss those cute detours I took.

I gave her a chance to do one last read after I cleaned up the blood from the first mess she made, just to check the continuity on what she cut, and she’s already loped off another 3000 words and she’s not even halfway through the book. Yikes. I had no idea she lived within me.

Of course, merely eliminating words does not make for a better book. (It does make for an easier to read bad book, but that isn’t my intention.) Eliminating the right words does, and damn if Bitchy Editor doesn’t seem to have a good feel for what needs to go. She’s also added some stuff, tweaking the plot slightly to make motivation more clear.

Why didn’t your original editor do this, you might ask? Well, he did much to improve the book, and he tried to do more. I ignored too many of his suggestion and he was a little too polite with me. Bitchy Editor has no such restraint.

The good news is I’m proud of this new product already, and excited to be releasing it sometime in mid-January. I’ll post more details here.