I Am Nobody Prologue Draft 4

I've started on the fourth draft of I Am Nobody and the prologue of it can be found at the bottom of this page.

I think this draft will be the last major revision to this book.  In this draft, mostly what I'm doing is streamlining the text.  What this means is that I remove things that are repetitious, reword things so that it says the same thing in fewer words, and generally remove as much as I can while still saying the same thing.

Here's an example.  This is the first paragraph of the book from Draft Three:

"The moonless night was cold, dark and empty, awaiting the blood of the innocent.  The crisp, early September air was still, untouched by the slightest breeze.  Away from the lights of the town, the stars filled the sky in spectacular display.  It seemed almost as though the night was holding its breath in anticipation of horrors yet to come."

And here's the same paragraph from Draft Four:

"The moonless night was cold, dark and empty, seemingly holding its breath as if in anticipation of horrors yet to come, and the spilling of innocent blood.  The crisp September air was still, untouched by the slightest breeze, and the stars filled the sky in spectacular display."

As you can see, they both say pretty much the same thing, but the paragraph from the fourth draft is 12 words shorter than the one from the third draft.

I managed to drop 615 words from this chapter without cutting really anything at all.