My novel In Bloom has now undergone its second edit. In its first edit, completed on July 13, 2025, we left it at 53 chapters, 556 pages, and 159,238 words. And now the numbers for the second edit:

53 chapters, 499 pages, 140,998 words.

I lost over 18,000 words! I mean, that’s a big chunk!

But it still means I have a 140K YOUNG ADULT book and that’s still too huge.

Science fiction publishers (and agents) do tend to build a little tolerance for worldbuilding into their word count caps, but they still typically don’t want counts this high. Still, seeing that 140K number feels like a glimmer of hope after starting with a word count close to 200K. Though it does feel weird to have “unwritten” enough words to make up a whole separate novel.

I don’t know if the experiment I have done here will work, but we’ll see. Suspecting that I’d still need to lose words after this edit, I documented my novel as I completed the second edit and outlined it, breaking each scene into a main idea and its supporting happenings. Then I can take a sort of top-down look and analyze which scenes might be able to be deleted, reduced to summaries, or combined with other similar scenes to reduce the words. I do NOT think just trimming sentences will be enough at this point, especially since I did an awful lot of that in this edit as well.

Edit 3 starts tomorrow.