Hello, everyone! 🙂 I have been slower than expected with completing my 15th book, which is a fantasy novella. I’m thinking this one needed some extra time as I didn’t feel a need to rush, so I’m happy with the slower pacing. I’m now on the final edit. The current word count is 18,640 words and I don’t think this will change much. I deleted an entire part of the story (along with an extra character which took off 7,000 or so words) after realizing I didn’t want it to appear in the final draft. I’ve edited/revised about ten times and it feels very close to being ready. I’m now doing the final proofread/edit just to catch any little typos/errors/over-usage of certain words.

Something that is good to do in writing is to tally up the # of common words in your manuscript. I try to use variety in my writing to avoid using common fillers such as “had” and “was” too much. Without further ado, here are the # of common words in my manuscript:

Had – 68 times (Pretty good! I’ve been deliberate about not using this word so often as it’s a habit of mine).

Was – 265 times :,( (I need to be mindful of this as I’m going through my final edit).

Very – 57 times (I’m happy with this. Not too many times!)

Really – 15 times

Ran – 38 times

Just – 33 times

Suddenly – 6 times

Toward – 16 times

So – 245 times (Yikes!)

Overall, I’ve done pretty good with not using too many filler words. The “was” and “so” need to be looked into during this final edit, though. Sometimes “was” can’t be avoided in past tense writing, but I’ll see if I can clean up this word’s appearance prior to publishing. The “so” is something that is *so* easy to over use, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for this filler word as I edit.

The plan is to publish my book in April, so stay tuned for the cover reveal and release date announcements soon! Thank you for tuning into my blog today. Are you working on anything story-wise these days? Let me know in the comments below!