Countdown to publishing: Editing continues

What's your editing like? Do you have a way that works for you? What are the main things you weed out of your writing during edits?

My story has been solid since I made the changes to the beginning. I forget when I did that - October maybe? I need to keep better track of my revisions. November I wrote most of the 1st draft of Book 3. I didn't do much December through some of January and have been doing edits since.

My edits lately have been for my filler words, just tightening it up. "Just" is a big one for me, I had it around 150 times in Book 1 back before I rewrote the beginning, then after the new beginning I had it again 45 times. :/ Now, it's at a more acceptable 10. Do any of you not worry about your fillers? I read two books this week with over 200 instances of "Just" in each, and I wonder why I worry about it - since both were traditionally published by well known publishers. But, I prefer tightening it up. I'm new with writing and I know in time, I'll just stop those errors like the others I stopped already.

When I first started writing last year, I wrote with passives and I got rid of those quick, once I started reading and studying the craft of writing. After that, I learned that I wrote with a lot of '-ing' words starting the sentences. It's an easy way to write for first person, but repetitive. That took a little longer to get out of my system. Now, I'm working on the fillers.

Fillers are harder for me because while I'm brand new to writing creatively (I've only been doing it just under a year) I'm a life-long pen paller - so I've always written in a conversational / lazy way - never proper English and such. So, I think getting my fillers under control will take some time - I mean just look at this. My biggest fillers are right here - just, so, some... ect.

Less than 10 chapters left to edit, get rid of most of the buggy fillers and be ready for release April 4th. YAY!


Natural Exposure is on pre-order! Will be released 4/4/20!

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