Tonight I sat down and finished going through Chapter Six with a pencil. I cut two and a half pages involving the "leaf subplot" that I'm trying to remove, but I don't know if this is just going to screw everything up in the end.

I don't think I have the hang of "edit for content first before doing any line editing, because what you fine-tune might not even be there later". I want to make it all better, while doing the content at the same time -- multi-tasking. Hey, maybe I can do it this way.

I'm going to be rewriting one page to make the characters active rather than reactive, and I've changed some of their attitudes towards the little things to make Saera (I hope) more likeable.

Dialogue has been chopped so interjections that don't really add anything don't slow it down.

At some point I'm going to have to make reference to the two horses they just casually left behind at the stables.

It looks to me like this draft will be the "cutting and clarification draft", where the next one will be the "deepen (add) and line-edit draft".
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I hate maths, but I love using numbers to predict when a project is going to be finished. If I do a chapter a week from now, this draft would be finished about halfway through December. That means I really want to be doing more like 3 chapters a week, so I have time to go through that next draft and read it a few times before releasing it around Christmas.

I can't wait for that moment when I transfer the book to a .mobi file and read it in that other form -- the form in which it will be read by others.

Is this rushing it? I don't know, but I need to get it out there.

I need to get it out there.
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UPDATE: I've now edited the digital document, and have trimmed the chapter of an estimated 1,000 words after taking into account the few paragraphs and the  transition that I still have to write.