The cutting room floor

I finished writing the new scenes for my first book and can put it aside for a while. The next task is getting my third book, the horror tale, out to a publisher. But the book, Xmas Carol, is too long and I'm going to have to trim it down.

This is an odd task for me to face as a writer. Trim the book? How do I do that? The terrible answer seems to be that I'm going to have to axe a goodly number of scenes, and some story-lines are going to end up on the cutting room floor. This is a painful prospect.

But the writing software that I use, Scrivener, will be a major help in this endeavor. It gives you the magical ability to select any number of scenes or chapters (or whatever) and see them as one long block of text. In other words it lets you hide the scenes you're considering deleting so you can see how the book would look without them. That is so cool. I almost can't wait to try it.

Plus this news bulletin: I've got a plan for how I'm going to deal with publishing this year. Here it is:

1. Send Xmas Carol to a brick-and-mortar publisher and see what happens.
2. Edit the first sci-fi book, The Worlds, into final form and give it away free on the net.
3. Self-publish the second book of the sci-fi trilogy, The Pod, the God and the Planet, and sell it on Amazon.

That's the plan and I think it's a go.