I’ve been editing ch 13 of Body Check for the past couple of days (I’m on a roll) and the way I’ve been editing is to basically start writing at the top of the document and deleting old passages as I rewrite them. Sometimes stuff goes in a completely different direction for a while than what’s in the original, so I err on the side of caution and don’t delete until I’m absolutely sure I don’t need to reference the old anymore – sometimes I have a really perfect line or something that I want to try and shoehorn back in, etc – and sometimes I wind up with really long WIP wordcounts this way.

So for a while ch 13 was literally 21,000 words long. Once I got through a particular scene and deleted the old ver, that shrunk it down to 17k, and I’m looking at it and going “oh, only 17k now? that’s p short. WAIT A MINUTE, NO ITS NOT”