{"id":417,"date":"2017-03-25T11:07:16","date_gmt":"2017-03-25T02:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=417"},"modified":"2017-03-25T11:07:16","modified_gmt":"2017-03-25T02:07:16","slug":"crutch-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/crutch-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Crutch Words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While I was giving my manuscript one last spit and polish for Pitch Madness, one of our team mentors suggested that we go through our drafts\u00a0and identify and\u00a0eliminate &#8220;crutch words&#8221;\u2014words or phrases that we&#8217;d overuse without realizing it.<\/p>\n<p>I made a list of the ones that kept showing up in my work. In no particular order, here they are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Eye-rolling (I realize my main characters are\u00a0teenagers and excessive eye-rolling wouldn&#8217;t be that unusual, but it still struck me as overused.)<\/li>\n<li>Head-shaking (My characters rolled their eyes and shook their heads so often that they must have looked like they all had some weird nervous disorder.)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;finally&#8221; (When my characters did or said things, they tended to be very <em>final<\/em> about it.)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I said&#8221; (There&#8217;s nothing wrong with this as a dialogue tag, but I tended to use it when there were only two people speaking and it really wasn&#8217;t necessary.)<\/li>\n<li>My main character could feel herself blushing or turning red an awful lot.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Actually&#8221; (That was the last one I caught and eliminated. I don&#8217;t know why I relied on it to such a ridiculous extent.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Today has been odd because it&#8217;s been the first day in a couple of weeks that I wasn&#8217;t fixated on either Pitch Madness or #PitMad. I&#8217;ve sent out five queries for <em>The Fire Before<\/em>. One was for the request from Pitch Madness and a second one was requested via #PitMad yesterday. (Yay!) I sent out three more to agents who I thought might like my work. I think that&#8217;s enough for a first batch, because I need to see how my query is being received. If I get turned down by all the agents, chances are my query isn&#8217;t working and needs to be fine tuned before I resume querying.<\/p>\n<p>And next month, I am doing Camp NaNoWriMo and editing the Draft Zero of my adult horror novel from last November. I&#8217;d love to get that beaten into querying shape as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While I was giving my manuscript one last spit and polish for Pitch Madness, one of our team mentors suggested&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions\/418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}