He, she, it--neat trick!

I found a faster way to highlight weasel words in Word. I knew about it several years ago and had forgotten, but I'll be using it a lot in the future. For those who don't know, use the Find feature (CTRL-F) and type in the word you are searching for. Tell it to highlight and find all. It will highlight them in black, and you click on the little highlighter on the tool bar. You can even change colors each time you search for a different word! Of course, with a black and white printer the different colors all come out various shades of gray, but it still shows where there are clusters of pronouns.

I added another hour yesterday. Now that I've had dinner and been in the hot tub twice, I'm going to fire up the laptop and work on the Book 2 plot. We might get a little work done on it next week. Maybe.

Tips are my friend

Today was my last Saturday working for a while. Next week we're closed and the following week I go back to Fridays, now that our classes are done. It was a good day to work today. Business was steady, if a little late starting, and I made $22.00 in tips. Even better, the average age of our customers today was 50-something. Good day!

He, she, it

We wrap up the writing class this afternoon. Yesterday I made one more edit of our story after searching for weasel words. When I found 'he' 420 times, I searched for 'she' and found 231. 'It' was close behind, with 227. The three words together comprised nearly 6% of the story.

To create a clear visual of the problem (for myself and my kids) I highlighted he, she, and they* in different colors. That made it very easy to see clumps of pronouns where sentences had to be reworded.

It was a rather lengthy exercise, but worth it for my own experience if nothing else. I will be doing this with other work, although I probably won't do entire manuscripts. A short story of 15,000 words is one thing; a 100,000 word novel is quite another. I will also be compiling a personal weasel word list AND saving it in a place where I can find it! Nothing like making a resolution on my birthday--no pressure!

Yesterday boosted my minute count, too. I'm up to 1,080 minutes, or 18 hours.


* I highlighted 'they' instead of 'it' for two reasons: I didn't search for 'they' before I started highlighting, but I saw a lot of them; and I figured taking care of 'he' and 'she' would take care of 'it' in the process. I was wrong about the second part--I only eliminated one. 'It' gets added to the weasel word list.

Story 1 done

I finished the story for my class today. I'll edit tomorrow. Normally I would wait longer--a week or two at least--but the class ends Friday. I'll post it on Dragons Roost this weekend. Stay tuned for Vengeance of Pachacuti!

(I'm at 660 minutes and 12, 815 words for the month.)

Make it so, Number Two

Like her mother before her, Vicky likes to curl up and watch TV when she's snorky and miserable. Commercials are annoying, but we have a lot of DVD's that we collected during our year in Italy. Personally, I gravitate to "Law and Order." Not Vicky. She dug out the one season of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that we got on sale at the BX right before we moved out of our house. We watched a few episodes on my laptop before we packed it all up to come back to the States, and it's been largely unviewed for the past two years.

Now we're having a Trekfest. I like Star Trek, and The Next Generation is my favorite. However, All Star Trek, All The Time is going to get old. It's just not right to have Klingons singing at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning.

I think we're all hoping she kicks her cold quickly!