The terror of severe editing

Starting is always the hardest part.

My agent likes my book (title now in flux), but says it is too long for its market. And I mean far too long. It is about the same length as my previous books, which seems to be my natural length, around 100-110K words. YA should be more like 80K.

And she's right, both for this market, and in general. Most books should be way shorter than they are. I say that myself, frequently. So why have I been so reluctant to savagely cut my own work? Because all of my wo...