Cataloging my dropped and filler words during novel revision

June was a slow month for editing. There was a nice long family vacation in the middle that was book-ended by a busy work schedule. Now that I'm fully back in editing mode, I've been paying more attention to word choice and sentence structure for my novel draft. This time around what I've been noticing are all of the dropped words in the draft, as well as the filler words that I'm cutting out. I'm not sure how common this is with other writers, but my most common dropped words are: "a / an," "the," "of," and "for." Related, I have a few over-used words that are filler. Beta-readers have pointed these out to me before, but I'm finding them on my own now, and the words I'm most often deleting are: "had," "just," now", and to a lesser extent adverbs used to modify some version of "said" or "walked." Surprisingly, with all the above minor addition and subtraction of words, in addition to putting more detail in where it was a bit scant, I've overall increased the text by about 1.5k words, which gets me just over 100k total. While that was never a goal, it's nice to be over that hill since my first two books were 107k and 101k words. This third novel looks to be on par in terms of length.

Over the new few months I've got two podcasts lined up and am eager to be able to talk about this new story. Once they are recorded and I have release dates, I'll share them in a future update post. One of them I'm pretty excited about because it's a fancier production than usual and I'll be traveling for an on-site interview. More details to come later.

On the topic of podcasts, there are couple that I recently have been enjoying. Both are related to TTRPGs, something that I've picked back up since the pandemic. The first is one called Graveyards of Arkham and it's a live-play of the Call of Cthulthu RPG. Really high production values in the recording and the DM is very good. The second one is Acquisitions Incorporated, which is live-play of D&D 5E by the crew at Penny Arcade. This one is a lot of fun and is DMed by some big names at WOTC. I've been listening to episodes while cooking dinner or while eating lunch at work. I'll run out of content pretty soon, so I'll be on the lookout for something similar in the near future.

Thanks for stopping by.