This is the first blog post I wrote from my phone.  Let’s see how this goes.

During the editing process for Jasper City one of the first things I did was cut out fluff.  There was a lot of fluff.  Over 20 thousand words of it.  You can imagine how painful that was after so much time spent writing all the fluff.

I’ve always been a packrat.  I don’t like throwing things away, especially if they’re things I created.  There’s a corner in my closet with a pile of beaten up duct tape purses of my creation that I will never use but perhaps never throw away.  The same goes for my writing.  Each draft that I’ve completed is sitting on my hard drive.

This is a good thing, because not all that fluff is bad.  Much of it contributes to the culture of the city and overall worldbuilding.  I plan to save at least one chapter and re-present it as a standalone short story.
So if you’re editing a manuscript and find you don’t have a use for so much filler, don’t get rid of it entirely.  You wrote that chapter for a reason, I’m sure, and it still has potential.  See if it can be recycled!