A guilt-free murder
by M. Bixby
(Vancouver, BC, Canada)
When I am attached to a piece of writing and reluctant to let go even though I know I must, I find it illuminating to copy the entire piece onto a clean sheet, keeping the original safe and whole, and rip the copy apart. Deleting whole paragraphs, chapters, characters even is much easier when you are risking nothing. Almost always, that second piece, the "copy" becomes my new working draft.