My WIP

I have edited my manuscript multiple times:

1 wrote it last may-august
2 re-wrote it in the middle of writing it, finished it and gave it to someone else
3 re-wrote it, gave it to someone else
4 rewrote it,
5 then rewrote it again, because I had a break from it, gave it to someone else
6 and rewrote it
7 Now I'm working on tightening it.

After this I have to give it back to one of my editors, and then to my original reader... After I go through those edits, my plan is to send it out to the world... I only hope it's ready, but there is a point when you have to move on, for better or worse and that time is rapidly approaching.

My MS was 87,685 (I still have a few edits that need to be made that will probably add to this word count, but hopefully a few will take away from it) Needless to say my MS feels a little heavy...

I found this really helpful for tightening my MS...

I've searched for:
Just (got rid of 458 words)
Guess (got rid of 253 words)
So (I'm still searching this but I'm up to thirty four words)

Not all words deleted were 'just' 'guess' or 'so' but it helped me tighten lengthy phrases around those words...I feel lighter already...

86942 words, my goal is to get it down to at least 80,000 because that's still a long book--that comes out to about 320 pages... oy! If I can get the story to work in less, that would be great, but I've also heard of people over editing their manuscripts--cutting, tweaking, chopping their words into oblivion...and I love this story too much to let that happen.