Yes, I’m supposed to be writing… shh! I know. Anyway, on to the reason for this post… I’m goal oriented. Extremely so. I love nothing more than a list, simply because I love checking things off of it. That’s why it is particularly hard for me when I have a long project, such as these three 80,000 word novels I contracted to write for Kensington. 300 or so pages is a lot to write before I can have the ultimate satisfaction of typing the words, The End. And for someone whose eye is on the finish line, it’s a long way off. I know I should enjoy the journey, blah, blah, blah. I know all that, but I need to have some sense of accomplishment. Setting a daily word count goal helps, when I reach it. When I don’t then I just feel worse. Then there is this little tool I discovered online on another author’s site actually. It’s a  Word Count Meter  and I love it. I find myself writing just so I can plug in the new numbers and watch the little bubble fill in. More importantly, just when I feel as if I’m getting nowhere, I look at […]

An author friend of mine suggested a self-editing program she uses–AutoCrit. I tried it and I found it was indeed an eye opener. It called me out on all the words I overuse. However, unless I wanted to pay something like $79 a year for the pleasure of using the tool, I could only paste 500 (or maybe it was 800 words) in at a time, and there was a limit to the number of uses per day. For an 80,000 word novel, that would suck. So when self-editing my recently released NEW ORLEANS short story, I ran a sample through, knew where my challenges and problem areas were, and kept those in mind while word-smithing the work. It definitely helped tighten the writing in the piece. Shortly after, I read (I think in GalleyCat MediaBistro) about another program that sounded like it did the same thing as AutoCrit so I checked it out. It was SmartEdit. It’s free to download, at least for now, and it analyzes the entire document as a whole at once. It finds, counts and lists the follwing: clichés, dialogue tags, repeated words, and ‘ly’ words. You click on one of the items in the […]