Cutting

I've set to work on this journal article, in keeping with Dr. Awesome's kind guidance, and now that I've collated and (more or less) streamlined the relevant bits of my diss, I am now faced with the awful prospect of...cutting things.  I know this has to happen, because the draft -- such as it is right now -- is sort of trying to tackle two subjects at once, which doesn't always fly for a modest journal article, and moreover it is currently 52 pages of double-spaced Times 12-point.  I am painfully aware that scholars at my entry-level status do not have good odds of success if they send a journal editor 52 pages of anything.  But I have to work through the instinct to pull the six-shooter from my hip at the suggestion that any of my gorgeously worded and intricately interwoven ideas be removed from the manuscript.  You know what I mean -- the feeling that you would almost put up your dukes rather than admit that something has to go.

I recognize that this instinct is neither rational nor ultimately useful, but it's tough nonetheless.  It's very difficult for me to see the two subjects under discussion in my manuscript as being comprehensible apart from each other, even though I am perfectly aware that many scholars in fields related to mine might not give a goddamn if I only spoke about one of the two.  I've edited a journal issue myself, so I know that I'm not the only one who has to let go of a futile sense of holism for a simple article.  I suppose I just have to find ways to talk about just one of the two things in and of itself, without spinning off into "and this connects to this through this and that and OMFG don't you feel the interconnectedeness of all human knowledge?" madness.  Don't yet know how, though.