When Snow Turns to Soup it's Just Plain Gross!!

Well, apparently editing has been keeping me plenty busy, seeing as how I've almost missed out on my two blog a week quota. I'm about half way through, so I'm feeling pretty good about things. Sometimes I want to kick myself in the head when I see how many times I use certain phrases. When I was doing edits on Daughter's of the Pond, I kept discovering the phrase "once again." I tried to cut down on that in the original writing round, but in my current book I kept finding how many times I wrote the phrase "a bit," or threw in words like "just" or "that" which are completely unnecessary half of the time. Always a growing process I guess. The thing is, when you're writing blog posts, or e-mails, or journal entries it's okay to let little things like that go. They're part of what makes it all feel quaint or voice like. In a novel, however, you're going to end up with readers taking a tally and maybe wanting to flush your book to get the sound of your voice out of their heads. I'm hoping not to end up in that situation. I haven't really been brutal or anything. My word count has waffled back and forth over about 200 words in each direction, so I feel weeding things out and clarifying when needed. It's also easier in an edit to see the places where you had a great word choice idea, but then forgot that you'd used the same brilliant word two sentences earlier, and threw it in a second time. Oh the joys. Anyhow, I'll keep this brief as I have a train to catch before the end of the hour. The lovely snow that fell yesterday has sadly been rained upon. It started in the evening, and seems to have continued on and off leaving it a sickening slushy slog. I can't say I'm all that excited to walk through it to the station, but I am looking forward to the trip. I get to spend the weekend with some lovely friends in the south of Czech. When I visited them three years ago they had a beautiful fat squishy baby for me to play with, as well as three adorable older children. Since then, their number has climbed to 6 in total, including one who is under a year. Yeah! Can't wait. Will miss the husby, but I'm sure a little cuddle with baby time will keep me from getting depressed :) No doubt there will be some glorious smilling pictures to come.