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Viliam_Bur comments on Open thread, Oct. 20 - Oct. 26, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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This resource seems quite good. It gives a few websites that compile lists, but your first step is going to be a bookstore- go find books that are likely to appeal to the same sorts of people as your own, and look inside them. Agents aren't usually listed in the title pages or published information, but it's good form to mention them in the acknowledgments, so that's where you'll get your initial list of names.
Ha! Possibly. Are you now skilled enough to rewrite it, better, in 30,000 words without losing anything?
If I had a reason to, yep.
I think I could manage that.
... tricky.
I don't think I can shrink it by a factor of 9 without losing quite a lot - even summarizing just the best bits might take more than that.
One of the most common signs of an author that has yet to mature is a conspicuously low density of language (especially so in fan fiction). I actually wouldn't be surprised if you could cut it to a ninth, although I suppose a third would be a bit more realistic without my having actually seen it. If you want to try this out without taking on an unreasonably large project, try cutting your old blog posts in half. Just as an example, I pulled a random paragraph from S.I. (which I might have mangled due to a lack of context):
"I never actually caught sight of Charles - he seemed to either be running errands, or hanging out with a few other guys aiming to create some sort of "Last of the Summer Wine" pastiche. After the second ladder crash, I suspected he married into the House household simply to have ready access to medical care."
"Charles was nowhere, probably off playing 'Last of the Summer Wine' with his buddies. No surprise- after the latest ladder crash, I'd bet he married a House for the insurance."
All this is just a heuristic, of course. The ability to compress language doesn't make you a good author, it's just something that most good authors can do.
If I was given a goal of cutting my verbiage in half, I think I can do that reasonably well. The question is, what's the meta-heuristic here? When should an authour go to the effort of aiming for shortened prose as opposed to longer text?
As a reader, it's less work for more reward.
The reason that you want to be able to compress language is, in a broader sense, to be able to use words with extreme precision. An author that can do this is in a good position to decide whether they should, but someone that defaults to the more expansive writing is probably not using individual words conscientiously.
I would go further: an author who has not edited down their prose to something tighter and with more bang for the buck is probably too in love with their writing to have carefully edited or considered all the other aspects of their story, such as the plot, pacing, content, or character voices.
Any thoughts or resources about the right amount of redundancy?