Good news from my editor yesterday, of the “good story, now we just need a little less of it” variety. I can do that. I can cut. Especially when she told me exactly where to look.

What’s funny is that the sections she said were expendable had, of course, seemed crucial to me. Character development in The Day-Glo Brothers had been a weak spot, but I guess I overcompensated.

Which is not hard to do, especially in a picture book. It may take a lot of thinking, but often it doesn’t take many words to fix what seems to be an insurmountable problem with a manuscript. That’s another one of those lessons I keep having to relearn, and if my editor hadn’t told me where to cut this time, I probably wouldn’t be remembering that lesson right now.