The major manuscript overhaul is complete (cheers fill the air) and with my data from the rewrite, I’ll make some important resolutions for the New Year.

1. Kill the adverb: I eliminated over 250 ly adverbs.  

2. Don’t overwrite: My manuscript is 10,700 words lighter with several useless scenes taken out. Watch out for phrases like nodded his head. He nodded is appropriate (what else can you nod?).

3. Replace the junk: Whether it’s a scene or a sentence, if it’s not your best, fix it. I rewrote more than 11,000 words. No more began to look or was looking. Make it looked.

4. Write from your main character(s) to your audience: With a thirteen-year-old male protagonist in a fantasy novel, my story will be marketed as middle grade when it sells (yes, when). I wrote the novel with the YA market in mind and without fully understanding point of view; therefore, I have a list of deleted words that wouldn’t come out of my characters mouth or enter his thoughts. Please laugh at me….

Contempt, rationalized, loathsome, nostalgia, magnitude, pronounced, zeal, subsided, dismay, subsequent, contemplated, commence, confiscating, assimilated, epiphany, improbabilities, feverishly, aggravating, periodically, reluctance, anomaly, impulsiveness, utterly, reassuringly

Stop laughing now!

5. Show, don’t tell: Exhibit A for beginning-writer-extraordinaire…Me. Yes I was telling emotion, and character qualities, and bashing my reader over the head with over-telling. I even told my reader something was a frightening phenomenon and something else unbelievably terrible. If I haven’t tickled my reader’s spine through action, emotion, and description, then I haven’t done my job as a writer. I could write a book on how bad I was at this, but I think you get the idea.

In the end, I changed thirty-three percent of the manuscript in this overhaul through deleting and rewriting and now have a 56,073 word story (from 66,798) that sounds better, flows better, and hopefully keeps readers turning pages into the night.

 More to come after I recieve reader feedback and complete a final polish.