So to find myself having a sudden unexpected rebirth of "fresh eyes" was a gift of fortune. And I took advantage of it.
Narrative Ambiguities
It's an autobiographical tale; I wrote down what happened to me and then carved out a good narrative entertaining story from that source material. But because it had its origins in my recollections, the story was originally chock-full of generalities (I often tended to do this; such-and-such periodically happened to me), most of which I later replaced with actual "scenes" (it was Monday; he said this, I did that, the bell sounded like this, the smoke smelled like that); but one form of that generalizing kind of writing persisted, in the form of short little ambiguities within my sentences:
She brought me back a Sprite or a 7-Up and one of those lunch sandwiches...
... I went out to fetch my sister for supper and she was giggling with Chuck or whispering to Tina...
... then he said "Whoa", or "Ho" or something like that, and the other guy relaxed...
Twigs, and Pruning
At this point, most of the scenes and scenelets in the story do something that connects with the story as a whole, and aren't just isolated events. Either they prefigure some later situations or events or they propel some aspect of the storyline forward, telling part of the tale I set out to tell. But I still found several paragraphs or descriptions that didn't do that and hence were not necessary. Stephen King famously advised authors to "kill your darlings"; I've never fully understood the advice since very few if any of the scenes and paragraphs in my story that are precious to me ("darling") are irrelevant to the story line, and the ones that were got killed off pretty early in the editing process. But these twigs, these pieces that don't presage or propel the plot or its subplots but just branch off briefly and then don't go anywhere, they weren't adding anything useful. And with my reborn case of fresh eyes, I pruned them.
Many of the paragraphs that do connect don't do so in a way that's obvious on first read. There's a scene in 9th grade where Derek stands up to a pair of boys harassing him on the school activity bus and they back down; it's not irrelevant to begin with, but it has the additional utilitarian value that Derek recalls that event when deciding to deal with a pair of guys harassing him at the Vo-Tech auto mechanics school when he's 20. And there's the account of him writing a poem in 9th grade English class in iambic pentameter and tetrameter which might not seem very necessary although it adds to the portrayal of his attitudes and interests at the time, but then at 21 in college he's in a poetry class and writing much more personal and heartfelt stuff, expressing emotional content and not just rattling off words in an established rhythm and rhyming pattern.
But other little pieces were just twigs.
The manuscript is down roughly 1500 words, bringing it from just short of 97,500 to just barely over 96,000 words. It's cleaner, tighter, and less rambly.
Oh, and I changed the working title once again. I really like The Story of Q but unfortunately so do a lot of other authors. I'm amenable to changing it back (or considering an entirely different title) based on the advice of my eventual publisher, but for now I'm fielding it as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET.
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