Well, this is the end of pass 3 of "operation word reduction."  I've managed to reduce a 118,500 word book to 85,400 although that's still not quite enough.  Although other books for this genre and age bracket have been bigger (Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is 87500 words), they're outliers.  I won't be able to relax until I get to a number in the 70,000s.

It's an odd sort of task really.  I described it recently as like a sculptor trying to shrink a 10ft statue into an identical 7ft o...


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