Sandie made her edits last night from the hard copy she was reading and cut 1,100 words.  We took out a minor character this morning and now we have less than 10,000 words to cut to make the goal of 50,000.
We'll take another crack at the beginning of the story.

I came to the end of the manuscript in my latest quest to get the story down to 50,000 words.  I'm still at 61,000 words, however.  I'll take another crack at the beginning of the story with my #1 editor and see what we can do and still preserve the essence of the characters and the st

Progress is slow, but I'm chipping away.
I've entered the Irene Goodman Historical Novel pitch contest.  Entries were due by July 1 and the winner will be announced in August. 

After more than a fortnight break, I'm back to editing.  I need to edit out about 16,000 more words to reach my goal of 50,000 to make the book suitable for Middle Grade readers.