Cut, Snip, Owie
Sometime last year I read Shana Abe's The Last Mermaid.  It's a collection of three stories involving the title creature, and it was one of the most beautifully written pieces I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

The prologue in particular took me.  Gorgeous, evocative, mystic, epic.  I thought, why can't I write like that?

So I decided to try.

I decided to try that mythic, evocative language in the prologue of Lusitania.

Several months later I'm finally giving it the evil eye.  The mythic tone fits nicely in the context of the story and what goes on behind the scenes, but the rest of the novel doesn't read that way.  And frankly...while I might eventually learn to write as beautifully as Shana Abe, the prologue makes it painfully obvious that it's not one of my strengths, and frankly an agent might look at it and go "Oh HAIL no."

Thus it must go.

I will save it for tomorrow, when I return to OC.  I don't even think surgery can save it; I'm just going to rewrite the entire thing.  I'll probably re-jiggle the first couple scenes around, too. 

Other than that, I pushed through some of the manuscript and trimmed a few hundred words.  I doubt I'll get it down much further, but one can hope. 

And now, to fiddle with Age of Fail.  I do want to try working on that one again at some point...