Writing.Com General Discussion

For the Dyslexic part, go with Ember's thinking, clearly a person with experience as well.

For the length part on its own, consider that you're the one who brought it up. If you think your girlfriend is probably cheating on you, she probably is. Same thing applies here, if you think your story might too long, take a serious look at it.

It does not hurt you to make that outline of your existing story and see if you can trim the outline down. At the minimum, this would help you identify the vital parts, versus the Tom Bombadil scenes that seem important, but don't advance the story.

Think of it as testing your plot. Especially when you assert that it's got to have all the scenes (from your original post), when you know somebody else thinks they can tell the same story in less, then you've got protectiveness going on, which will make it harder to make that decision.

Doing that test doesn't mean you have to make any cuts. Who am I to tell you to cut stuff, I haven't even seen your story or outline :) But doing the exercise could answer the question a bit more objectively and let you consider the size from a different angle.

I would note, the outline test isn't going to cure everything either. I have crufty things in my short story that are more a problem with how I wrote the scene with too many words. So for me to cut things down, I have look at how I present some stuff, particularly as I used exposition too much, rather than showing through character action. Which might in turn grow my word count after I cut and find a new way to present the information.