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Showing posts from January 3, 2018

Working on it Wednesday #55: My Tics and Tips

I'm in the process of editing one of my books, one of the final edits before I send it out to a third party editor for fresh eyes.  This is the edit when I make sure that the plot hangs together and the emotional beats make sense.  It's also the edit when I remove all the words I use too often out of laziness or habit or some combination of both. This is my list of words: 1.  That .  This is a big one.  I cannot stop inserting "that" into sentences that don't require it.  (See the second sentence above.  Sometimes, "that" is necessary and important grammatically, and sometimes it's necessary for the rhythm of the sentence, and sometimes I'm doing it because my fingers insert it without me even thinking about it.  Most of the time, I can just delete it, but the trick is finding it in the first place.  (Thanks Find/Replace!) 2.  Some reason.   For some reason, I insert "some reason" into sentences when really what I need to do is e