Yeah, that's why writers need editors. You can tell when a writer becomes really successful - their novels get longer and more laborious to read, because they are now more powerful than their editor, and the editor is afraid of upsetting the author. The last Stephen King novel I read (I think it was "The Stand", about 15 years ago) was over 1,000 pages long and you could have easily removed four or five hundred pages and not changed the story one bit. After that disappointing chore, I never read another Stephen King novel.

But alas, my posts are too long because I don't even rate an editor. And worse, this reply has also grown far too long.