Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Editing update: I am now about three-quarters of the way through editing The Promised King, Book I. At my current pace, I should be ready to start it on its inevitable journey towards lots of rejection in about two or three weeks. Actually, I'm slightly waffling a bit: I'm thinking that since I'm this close, I should go ahead and get a portion-and-outline ready and send it out right now, since by the time they'd look at it and respond (by asking to see the entire manuscript, I hope) I'd have the thing done and be on to typing up Book II. I may go ahead and do just that, in which case I'd hope to send out the first P&O next week. (For those unfamiliar with what I'm talking about here, a "Portion and Outline" is just that: you send a publisher the first three chapters of your book, followed by a bare-bones summary of what happens after that. They peruse this, judging by the Portion if they like your writing and by the Outline if they like your story, and if the answer is affirmative on both counts, they request the full manuscript.)

Some little editing facts-and-figures: I have, to this point, cut 15,323 words from the manuscript. With six chapters and the epilogue to go, I think I'm pretty much guaranteed to hit my goal of cutting 18,700 words (that number being ten percent of my original manuscript, 187,377 words). My average chapter-length in the rough draft is 8,423 words; as of right now, the average chapter-length of the revised draft is 7,864 words. This means that I have almost cut two entire chapters of material from the book. That's a lot of flab.

And just on a lark, the other day I did a small estimation of the word count of George R. R. Martin's book A Storm of Swords, the third doorstop in his Song of Ice and Fire series. I don't recall the exact figure, but I know it was more than 400,000 words. (Methodology: I came up with an average number of words per line, multiplied that by the number of lines per page, and then multiplied that by the total number of pages in the book, not counting the appendices. This yields a very rough ball-park figure.) This means that one volume of Martin's six-volume series is longer than the entirety of my two-volume set The Promised King is likely to be (assuming that Book II is about the same length as Book I). My conclusion is, of course, that I'm not working near hard enough.