I am murdering my darlings quite thoroughly in this edit/rewrite.
It hasn’t been fun. I’m losing a lot of storytelling and world building I’m going to have to build back in.
But there’s a storyteller’s adage, rendered sometimes as “Murder your darlings” and others as “Kill your darlings”, which simply means to get rid of all the self-indulgent stuff.
And when I look over my first novels, I find a lot of self-indulgent stuff.
I hope I’ve discovered the line between world-building and self-indulgent stuff now. I have to admit part of what I put in the original story embarrasses me and I cut it quite readily. I’m a bit scared of whether I’m cutting too much.
Oh, well, I can always add some back…
Words Like Me 