The last few days I have been using the buffalo carving technique for writing a manuscript on the Palos Verdes anticlinorium. (How do you carve a buffalo? You get a big block of marble/wood and cut away everything that does not look like a Buffalo).

Back in November I rewrote a thesis...trying to make use of existing text. Before Christmas I got back to this and saw that it was too long and that it was somewhat redundant. We plan to submit to Journal of Geophysical Research, and they not only have page charges, they penalize long papers. After 10 or 12 pages they charge twice per page. Plus, few people read the longer papers. So, I did a character count of my long JGR paper on Santa Monica Dume fault, and found that this manuscript is longer. So, I've been rewriting and deleting to make it shorter, and 2/3 of the way through, I've cut about 15% of text, and went from 19 figures to 15. I wanted the paper about 1/2 this length, but it is not going to happen....it is now already slightly shorter than the previous paper....I wanted 10 or 12 pages published, the previous paper was about 22 pages, this might be 18 if my co-authors edits help me reduce further.

I have been first author on two 4 page papers in Geology. We will follow up this long manucsript on Palos Verdes with a manuscript for a 4 page paper that also will include Los Angeles more.
Chris