New grammar addiction: the word “then”

This is just a short post and this post has a moral: Listen to your editors.

While editing The Light Side of the Moon, I have found, or more appropriately, my editor has found that I have a new grammar addiction: “then”

Merriam-Webster defines then : at that time : at the time mentioned

—used to indicate what happened or happens next 

—used to indicate what should be done next

You might remember, that when I was going through editing of Other Systems,  my poor editor (someone else) found and cut at least fifty semicolons. I am not exaggerating. In the second round of edits, I overused the word “as.”

Apparently I needed a new way to combine sentences–so I moved on to “then.”

For some logical reason, I thought it looked cooler to use “then” to combine sentences instead of the almost invisible “and”. I have no idea why, but thankfully my editor caught it and conducted an intervention.