(#2) I wrote something – now what?!

Ok, I have 110,000 words written, now what?

I suppose the first thing was to get a feel for the norms of my target audience (admittedly late in the game to do that, but remember – this is my story, with all my mistakes and triumphs in the order that they happened.)
I am shooting for the fantasy genre with the primary protagonist being 12 years old. After checking, and cross-checking, I realize “oh-oh” 12 yr olds dump me in the sweet spot for a MG age target audience.
“What’s wrong with that,” you ask?
Well the norms for a first time author’s book in the MG arena is closer to 60,000 words. >Gulp<-–
I had an epiphany – the child is now 14. A little tweaking here and there and if I squinted I could try to nudge my way into the YA market. Again you ask, “Why does that matter?”
Well simply put, the norms on length are in the 80,000 words for that category and in my own pin-headed mind, I couldn’t stomach the idea of cutting my manuscript in half but lopping off 30,000 words seemed more possible.
Now the daunting task of doing exactly that. This I believe is analogous to deciding which limb you want to cut off. No immediate good answers come to mind.
Taking emotions out of the equation, I simply looked at all the chapters I wrote and analyzed them by having each answer this question, “Are you absolutely required to further the story or are you interesting filler?”
Surprisingly enough, some of my “limbs” fell into the filler category, and since I was clearly over my own word count budget, CUT-CUT-CUT!
After a solid week of combing through the manuscript, I had sliced, shaved, and molded it from the chunky 110,000 word hunk to a somewhat more svelte 83,000 words. “Close enough…”
Next step – get someone else to read it and cringe as I get the feedback….(I’ll give you a hint – the best feedback isn’t nice)….
-Mike Rothman