I haven’t received my official revision letter yet from my editor for Mark of the Demon, but I’ve been working my way through the manuscript, focusing on some of the plot issues she mentioned when we spoke on the phone. This is the first time I’ve read through the manuscript since it went on submission last August, and oh-my-goodness am I ever seeing it in a new light! I don’t know if my writing has improved that much since then (though I have been writing a LOT,) or if the elapsed time is giving me new perspective, but let’s just say that I’ve been doing a unspeakably large number of line edits. I’d never quite realized just how deep my love of adverbs and “stage directions” ran. Out of curiosity I ran a search through the manuscript and found 172 instances where someone looked at someone or something, 99 sighs, 81 noddeds, 80 times that something was done softly, 69 times that it was done slowly, and 88 instances of someone shaking his/her head.
Oh. My. God.
I can only take heart in the fact that at least now I am aware of such things and will be far more careful about avoiding them in the future. And, that the title of this entry does not actually appear anywhere in the manuscript.
But for now I need to go buy some more red pens.
We had so many “sighs” in our first book we had to put it on a list of empty words to globally search out with each new MS. I thought maybe it was the sign of a depressed writer. Glad to hear I’m not the only one. *sigh* “Nods” is another good one. Has someone written a book called “Sighs and Nods”?
2008
Eric Mayer