From the thesaurus today

I’m sorry for the week of radio silence. No good reasons, just Life happening at the speed of life.
But yesterday, I got edits! And because I was for some reason in the mood, I sat myself down and did them.

On editing.

Words I needed help with from the thesaurus today :
bond
shiver
slowly
twitch
quickly
horribly
dire
deliberately
encouraged
sharply
stab
dark
delight
release
demand
searching
needed
darkened
attack
attacker
drawing
thick
thickly

When I got my edits back, there were 3 things that I needed to focus on.
First, I have a real problem with sentances that start “He (did something / said something)” and “She (did something / said something)”. I’ve talked about it before on twitter, and I know it may be a sign of small minded narrow opinioned reader-quirkiness, but to me it makes for dull reading. And so I have to force myself to use that as an opening in a sentance of my own writing. Now, much like the words “… he said” as a dialogue tag, there is a real place for this to be used in writing. What there isn’t a place for is using things like “His arms reached for her” instead of “He reached for her”. The first is even worse than the second actually. And I do it All. The. Time. So I had about 180 of those to clean up. Not that I was counting.

The second problem (and let me get comfortable on my couch while I’m unloading my soul here) is with those good old adverbs, the ‘ly words. I muchly love them, abundantly evenly. Ahem.

And third? Every few pages I pick a new word-of-the-day. Something like demand. Or delight. Or desire. (A whole heap of them are D words, it turned out.) And I use it over and over, occasionally even twice in one sentence.

Now, you’d think that my own self editor would have caught most of this before I sent the dang thing to my editor. And what I missed, the CP’s would have caught. But it turns out that we have editors for a reason, and no one’s eye is as sharp as the eye of someone who edits for a living.