Welcome to the Wonderful World of Crutch Words
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.
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.
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