Howdy,
Well, I accomplished my NaNoWriMo goal – knockout, rewrite, and edit a complete short story. In other words, have it entirely buttoned up for submission by the end of the month. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it, but over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I battened down the hatches for some serious editing.
So, the first draft was roughly 13,000 words. Now, that’s a little long for a short story. It really limits the market the piece can be submitted to. My goal in editing was to knock it down to under 10,000 words. This does two things. First, it opens up tons of markets. For many short story markets, 10,000 words are the cut-off. Second, this is really the more significant bit, cutting thousands of words really leans down the story, removes all the fat. To be honest, I didn’t think I could get the tale to under 10,000 words, but I kept on pruning until the word count dropped to about 9,800.
Anyway, I just submitted this brand spanking new sci-fi story today. So, fingers crossed, that in about a month I'll have some good news to share.