Or should I say, welcome once more?
This time around, since Unequal was a book I'd written a while ago - you know, before I became totally awesome* - I have additional words to add to my usual words and my usual words were worse than usual.
It took me off and on about 4 hours to go through all the THAT. Started out with 413 instances. Ended up at 124 instances. The next day, I tackled LIKE. Went from 322 to 106. Then I did JUST.
Funny thing about JUST, though. I did my usual search for JUST and Word told me I had 434 instances of it. Ack! But I forgot to allow for the fact that one of my central characters is named JUSTIN (of which there were 328 instances... he talks and people talk about him a lot). JUST is also inside ADJUST. In the end, after all the weeding was done and the other instances were tossed out, I wound up with only 32 instances of JUST all by itself.
Yesterday was a bear of a day between a 90 minute power outage and doing Christmas cards, but I did manage to tackle SAID. Only got about halfway on that, but I managed to eradicate it 88 times so far.
Those four are my worst offenders. Today, I'll finish SAID, then tackle KNEW/KNOW and THINK/THOUGHT. And WHEN. Then there'll be NOW and STILL. Then we have EVEN.
There are others, but those aren't as bad this time, so I will probably leave those alone. Unless on my read-through they become irritating. Then I'll go back and scrub those out, too.
After dinner last night, I told Hubs I needed to get back to work. Here's how that went...
Hubs: But you've been working all day.
Me: This is supposed to release on Monday.
Hubs: Call your publisher and ask for an extension.
Me: :laughing: I am the publisher.
Hubs: :laughing: Exactly.
Me: I called her and she said no.:more laughing:
Anyway, there's a lot of work still to be done, so I'm not
sure I'll have this out on Monday like I promised. Sorry about that.
On the bright side, it'll be better than it would be if I didn't bother
doing this.
And now, back to work...
*That was a joke, folks. If I was totally awesome, I wouldn't need to scrub crutch words out of every manuscript. Derp.
I'm a big one for using 'just,' too!
ReplyDeleteGood luck with your final stretch on the book. :)
Even is one of my bugaboos. I've been known to take out that and my editor puts it back in. *shrug*
ReplyDeleteAnd it'll get done when it gets done and will be all the better for when you release it.
*You are TOO totally awsesome!
What about 'very'? I keep thinking I don't use it, then I do a find. Oops.
ReplyDelete