Yesterday, my brother and I tore my whole book apart and performed major surgery on its structure without anesthesia. I flinched at every chapter we talked about cutting, but understood the wisdom of it. 
Here is a picture of our brilliant method which I'm sure no living writer has ever conceived of before: flashcards - one scene per card.
I began this morning on fire, by discovering that I start way too much dialogue with "Well," and over-use "very" and "in short order." In short order? What the? Anyway, I zapped all those little suckers with an easy little search and destroy, er, replace, and began the real task of slicing and dicing and beefing up one of the major scenes which I hadn't done enough with before.
By 2:30 p.m., when the phone rang, I was on a roll.
"Where are you?" asked my husband, who is in Greece with our two kids.
"Home. Why?" What an odd thing to micromanage from thousands of miles away.
"Why aren't you at the airport to pick us up?"
"Because you're coming back tomorrow."
"No, we're at JFK. Come get us."
Ugh. I won't get into details about who's to blame for the mix-up (suffice it to say that I have a text message that proves it's not me, but don't tell my husband that). Anyway, I'm delighted to have my kids back home, all tan, kissy and, alas, still bickering amongst themselves. But my day of editing is shot.
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