Two posts caught my eye recently:
At D M Cornish's blog, he writes that he recently completed draft two of book two in his Monster Blood Tattoo series and comments on reducing total word count:
"It has been one crazy, no-other-life-but-writing kinda time, but Draft 2 of Book 2 is done and in the hard-working hands of those mysterious folk who make it better. At this point I managed to excise 4 chapters and roughly 25,000 words (give or take) - very satisfying result. I don't mind this one bit. I have a tendency to over-write and all this fat-cutting does is make the text more readable, better-flowing, better connected."
On Holly Black's blog, she talks about the F-word in teen fantasy.
"Leaving out books that were read by teens/bought by school libraries but published as adult books (even if the book was subsequently republished as YA), the first fantasy YA book with the f-word appears to have been Francesca Lia Block's Baby Bee-Bop (1997). Although Weetzie Bat (1991) had cursing, it didn't have the f-word. Along the same lines, Fade (1991), while containing cursing, didn't have the f-word. "