I’m still filled with joy at actually completing (synonyms: finishing, being done with, mastering, gazumping, hammering, nailing, slamming, winding up) a chapter. I can now “finish” all of them. Editing, rewriting, etc. can be done.
But there’s a caveat. My chapter 2, which miraculously compresses pivotal reactor history of excessive complexity into one narrative, is TOO LONG. Seventy-five or a hundred pages, actually, depending on the density of a page. Decapitation will trim that but not to the forty pages that an 800-page book of twenty chapters demands. And I can’t see myself eschewing the drama and “truth” of the story I’m assembling.
What to do? Think, certainly.