I know I’m in countdown phase now because I am living, drinking and eating this story. I have pages in front of me at mealtime, it’s my before-sleep reading material, and I’ve set up permanent residence at the computer. Yesterday I was in front of the desktop from sun-up (slight exaggeration–I’m never anywhere at sun-up) until about 7, at which time I realized that if I continue re-writing this draft as I have been, adding details and deepening the characters, the book is going to be too long. 
I’m contracted to write books of 100,000 + words. That roughly translates into 400 manuscript pages.  My books usually run 425-500 manuscript pages.  If I continue as I have been on this one, it will easily top 500 and I think that’s too long. Sometimes a story demands that length, but I don’t think this one does and I need to be more judicious in my editing. Easier said than done.
At the same time that I realized I was going over length, I hit a place in the story that wasn’t working for me structurally. It made me panic. I expect to have numerous mini-panic attacks during these few weeks before the July 1 deadline, but knowing I will have them and enduring them are two different things. I reminded myself this is the challenge I love–figuring out how to make a story work. I took the 180 pages I’ve re-written so far onto the porch to read as a reader would so I could see the flow. (An aside: I know I’ve mentioned this a zillion times, but I adore finally having a porch! It has a ceiling fan and I stretched out on the faux-wicker sofa and read until midnight, listening to the barred owl hooting in the woods behind my house and the deer [at least I hope they were deer] snapping twigs as they nibbled their way through my yard. By then a lot of itty bitty critters had found their way through the gap in the screen door and were flying around, but I didn’t care. It was soooo lovely out there!)
As I read, I discovered a few things: the pace, structure and characterization of those first 180 pages work; some of the writing is excellent; a couple of things made me laugh (rare in my books); and some of the writing was wretched. I had a pen in my hand and wrote blechhhh! next to those parts, which was my reaction to reading them and which will let me know where I still have work to do. 
After reading that chunk of the book, I have a good sense of how to tweak the structure, and that’s what I’ll work on today.
Now, for any guys who have read this long post looking for the information promised in the subject line: size really doesn’t matter.  Not to the sort of women who read my books, anyway.