The story ended up around 5970 words. It's usually worthwhile to cut; early drafts have excess verbiage and little dead-end bits that don't advance the plot or shed light on the theme.
Such cuts carry their own risks. Extra words get left in; essential words get left out. Tense and number shift. It is very difficult to spot on the seventh or twelfth read-through. I see what I intended to say, not what I wrote.
I was very glad that Tam agreed to do a last-minute reading and markup. Sure enough, she found a half-dozen glitches -- and one misuse of the subjunctive that still feels right me. I changed it anyway; better to color inside the lines as much as possible, so you can scribble outside of them when it's necessary.
Will the editors like it? I don't know. I do know that having extra eyes on the work has bailed me out many times. Between the members of my fiction critique group to Tam's well-informed once-over, if the end result reads smoothly and makes sense, they played large parts in getting it there.
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