When Does Size Matter?

I am revising my second book, hopefully for the last time. When I started this (hopefully) final round of editing, my novel stood at a respectable 77,000 words. As I'm polishing and editing, I'm doing a lot of cutting. The word count has been reduced to 63,000 words and I've only revised through Chapter ten.          
     Presumably, I'm going to be cutting more and the word count will continue to shrink, possibly to novella size, which it is perilously close to already. After some thought and discussion with my writing peers, I decided I'm okay with this. I am a huge fan of short stories and novellas (I, in fact, have a horse named Novella) and as this second book will be e-published, I feel the word count is not much of an issue.
     I briefly wondered about feasible ways to add to the book, but as I've mentioned in previous posts, I've caused myself huge amounts of grief, confusion and rewriting from page one by attempting to bring in things like new plot twists.  A recent experience with the work of a favorite author also helped to frighten me away from the idea.
     In recent posts I have mentioned this favorite series author whose last two books I'm disappointed with. In addition to things I've already mentioned, in her latest novel and the previous one there were several scenes that were so completely unnecessary, they were obviously what I ungraciously refer to as filler, or padding. The scenes were amusing, because her characters continue to be fun, but added nothing to the book, except to make the reader wonder, "And the point of this is what?". It did not help that the author had already presented the main character with a crisis to deal with, before having the heroine go off on frivolous jaunts that had no connection to the issues being faced, instead of working to solve the problem. Utterly frustrating for even the most adoring fan.
     These two books by this author make up the perfect 'poster child' for the rule: If it doesn't move the plot forward or add to character development - cut it! Another of my favorite writers includes scenes that are humorous or interesting but, while not necessary to the story, they work as part of the plot and do not leave the reader thinking, "Why is this here?" But overall, this is a situation to avoid.
     So if I don't have an inspiration that will add something wonderful to my novel and make it a better book - as well as a longer one - shorter is okay.

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