I’m on the home stretch with Revealed in Mist, and will be announcing the release date this coming week. I’ve finished the rewrite following the developmental edit (and the workshop that so inspired me at the RWNZ conference), and received feedback from two of the three people I sent it to for a final read. It still needs a proofread, but first, now that I’m comfortable with the story, I’m going on a crutch word hunt.

I use ‘so’ far too much. And ‘many’. And many of my characters start sentences with ‘Well’. And I have a habit of starting sentences with ‘And’ (or ‘But’). I’ll do a search for these and for ‘that’, asking myself a few useful questions. “Does it add to the meaning?” “Have I used this word five times on this page already?” “Can the word be removed? Or replaced with a better one?”

What are your crutch words?