Purging a world that appears to often in my vocabulary. I have to work on that...... :)

One of the reasons I recommend having someone else, a person you trust, look at your work before it goes to print, is that they catch things you do without even thinking about it.  According to things that he's written, Stephen King has his wife, Tabitha, go over his work before he sends it to the publisher for consideration.  After having a friend on Facebook go through with the specific purpose of finding my gaffs that I may have missed, she's pointed out that I use one word A LOT.  In fact, I've used that word a lot even in this short paragraph that I'm writing to illustrate the point.

She has pointed out that, whether intentional or unintentional, the word "that" appears A LOT in my work.  A lot of times, there simply isn't another word I can substitute or a different way to phrase what I'm trying to say without getting into another problem that I've noticed myself - I can tend to be VERY wordy.  I've caught myself writing a half-page long paragraph as one long sentence, substituting commas at points when I really should put in a period.  Those paragraphs are usually caught on the first edit and corrected before the rough draft leaves my computer and gets sent off to my publisher.  But this is NOT the time for me to have such a thing pointed out, as final edits are NOT the time to be re-writing a book to cut back on the use of a word like "that".  As far as this book goes, that will have to be that, but I have been alerted and will have to think about my use of the word and see if there are ways to stop myself from using that word so often.

I'll have to watch that in future writing.....

*Looks back at the above post and grins evilly, suspecting the intentional overuse of the word is going to make the point better than anything else I could have done......*