Time to tinker

It couldn't be avoided any longer. I have fired up my memory stick, donned my pernickety hat, and begun an edit of my second novel. It was written during the glorious frenzy of last year's NaNoWriMo, and is therefore slightly...shall we say...ragged. It rambles through knotted masses of adverbs, wanders off down irrelevant and verbose dead ends, and indulges in unnecessarily minute descriptions of everything.
Despite all of this, I can't help feeling that there is a story in there, and I must extract it. It will be arduous and frustrating work, but at least I have made a start. I wanted to begin now because my next Open University course is breathing ominously down my neck and threatening to dominate my every waking moment (the course is 20th Century Literature: Bunfights among Smug and Wordy Critics, or something like that). Knowing that the edit is a work in progress somehow makes me more likely to carry on once my life is my own again.
Now, if you'll hand me my machete, I'll go and see to those adverbs.