My apologies to those who are only into this blog for the Jiu-Jitsu, all two of you.

I’m finally breathing again now that I’ve turned in my final draft of Wish YOU Were Here, the sequel to Wish I Was Here. I’ve also been sewing together pieces of Book 3, Wish We Weren’t Here, and reviewing audiobook drafts of Book 1.

I had plenty of time to work on Book 2 and wasn’t stressing it much, thinking it would be a cinch. But when it comes to editing, knowledge isn’t power, it’s added frustration.

Some things are simple to correct. You don’t need “very,” “really,” “even,” just,” and oftentimes “that.” I eliminated those. They are just really very much unneeded. I’m not sure how they got in there in the first place, aside from me writing like a normal human.

Same goes for filler words such as, “There was/were” and “It was/were.” An example: “There was no one around” becomes “No one was around.”

Another tip: You don’t need “and then.” One or the other will do.

I also had to search for “pet phrases” and get rid of their overuse. For me, that was “despite myself” because, despite myself, I use that often.

Then there’s the no-adverb rule. Sometimes that’s easy to solve, such as: “In the reflection of the window, I witnessed Isaac lift an arm and sniff. He made a face and quickly put his arm down dropped his arm.”

At other times, I don’t see a simple solution, so [the horror!] I let the adverbs lie, despite having read that at least one agent will reject a manuscript at the sight of a single adverb.

More challenging is following the tried and true writing rule of telling instead of showing. (Relax, people. That was a joke.) The trickiest part is facial expressions, which meant looking up how someone appears when they’re amused, for instance, rather than just saying they look amused. (Bonus points if you noticed I used “just” again.) For instance, “His expression turned from anger to alarm” became, “To my satisfaction, his narrowed eyes widened.”

Another writerly bugaboo is not having the same or nearly the same word, or even a homophone of the same word, twice on a page. Here was my problem: “He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand upright. Standard Isaac.”

I could change “standard” to “classic,” but I used “Classic Isaac” in book 1. Which is the greater sin? So I tried changing standard to typical, but that sounded negative, which isn’t what I was going for. “Usual” doesn’t have the right feel, either. I went round and round with synonyms before finally changing “stand upright” to “stick up at an angle.”

All this left me thinking, How long have I spent on this?!

Here’s another example. “With no time to waste, my hands on his shoulders, and a foot on the handrail, I jumped. Isaac held me aloft by the waist as I stretched my arms and legs, planting my feet near the ceiling on one side and my scarf-covered hands on the other.”

In case you missed it, I had both “waste” and “waist,” so I had to change waste to lose.

There’s also my reference to a sticky seatbelt. Then, a couple of paragraphs later, I say, “Can we stick with this car?” Does anyone notice or care about these things?

Here’s another no-no: “He removed the cup lid, scooped out ice with his fingers, folded the napkins around the ice, and held it against his bad eye.” Who sees the problem? If I use “and,” it indicates he did all those actions at once, even though he obviously didn’t. Using “then” winds up with the problem of using then as a conjunction, which it’s not. I could break this into smaller sentences to alleviate that problem, but come on! Can we just (just!) read like normal humans?

Again, who would notice these things? But I’m trying to be fastidious now so I don’t have another incident like Book 1 when I got the formatted copy back from the publisher and requested a ton of changes. My eyes were so fresh after so long away, they were practically in diapers. (Oops. Adverb.)

My beta readers hadn’t raised these alarms. In fact, none of them caught that I had changed the first name of a character (Richard to Robert). That’s not even a rookie mistake on my part. That’s towel boy. But my readers were just presumably [just, adverb, and beginning a sentence with a contraction, oh my!] enjoying the story.

I’ve also ended sentences with prepositions all the heck over the place. Rules of the craft are important and all, but at a certain point, you gotta take the stiffness out and let the writing be.

The average reader isn’t paying attention to these things. I don’t need to win over an agent or even a publisher. So, I’m trying to find the middle ground of following the rules to a tee and not killing myself making it “perfect” by all these standards.

What do you all think? Do you try to follow every last rule, or do you keep it human?

I know, I know. Give us trivia and pepper the post with pics! I’m too worn out. Next time!