Our esteemed town council, in reaction to the Covid 19 virus scare, closed the library I work at. At first they estimated the closure would be for two weeks, but now they are saying it will be until the threat passes. The employees were told they could use their PTO hours, and take the time off, or they could come into work. Not wanting to waste my PTO, I chose the latter option. I have a few work-related projects I can busy myself with, so I am not terribly bored.
This hiatus from patrons is also giving me the opportunity to do some editing on the two manuscripts I have, both of which need to be reduced in length.
I really do not like having to cut out parts of my manuscript, but I also realize I have a tendency to include too much information, and to go off on tangents which, though amusing, really add little else to the story. The real difficulty come in having to chop out something which I felt was well-written, but has only minor relevance to the tale I am telling.
*sigh*
I find it is necessary, as I go through this process, to remind myself a unpublished manuscript isn't worth the paper it is written on. If my goal is to educate and inform, I must get my work out there, and if this means I must strictly adhere to a publishers word count (some of which seem quite arbitrary), this is what I must do.
Anyway, I hope you all are surviving this panic-demic.
(the illustration accompanying this post is "The Plague" by Arnold Bocklin (1898), who is one of my favorite of the symbolist artists)