Watch words

The week that was has moved by in a blur.

I dragged out the two Knight Stalker books to read through and discovered that, combined, they totalled over eight hundred pages - double spaced.

Before I began, I changed the colour of words to watch from black to red: that, was, were, have, been, is, are, be, will; you know the list. Changing the colour of watch words is a great way to learn not to use them; you'll see just how red the page can become.

To give you an example, these two books are about 207,000 words. Of those words 8,259 are from the above list. That's one in 25 words that need review, but doesn't include: -ly, not, very, am, up, down. With those words, raise the number to 13,169, or one in fifteen words. And there are others to search for.

I'm sure you can imagine pages speckled with blood red...

Anyway, it's not doom and gloom. (I recall one of the first pieces I wrote for a creative writing unit and it came back with more red than black; I felt so disappointed I nearly left the course - until I saw other student papers that were worse than mine.) By highlighting where you've been lazy - and I admit it; Nano is, after all, about word counts - you can correct, or give deeper thought to the sentence or paragraph.

So now that it's done, I can go back and change stuff, along with back-plotting. That's plotting after you've written 'The End'.

Back plotting should be fun. I got a laugh out of some parts of the books, and a touch of tragedy, horror, and wonder that I'd written it. This is why it's good to not look at your work for weeks, or in this case, months. I can cast a fresh eye over it.

Time to raise those statistics... a lot!