Liveblogging an editing session

I just spent an hour doing a find-and-replace for weasel words and phrases in my last novel (round one of the serious edits) and liveblogged it, in order to keep myself amused. Maybe it'll amuse you too!

7:35 - I have one serious swear in this whole story. It needs to disappear, of course, but I can't for the life of me figure out what to put in its place. (It has one job, but it does that one job so effectively that I'm loathe to lose it.)

7:47 - "Their trunks disappeared" is a funny phrase . . . until you realize it's talking about trees.

7:56 - Is it a sign of good dialogue if I crack myself up, reading it? (No, not the trunks thing! real dialogue!)

7:57 - My delete button is going to wear out.

8:01 - It's very hard to avoid overusing the word "answer" when one of your main characters conducts interviews for a living.

8:02 - Also, the word "answer" looks weirder and weirder the more times I read it.

8:14 - Phew. 146 instances of "asked" cut down to 105. That's some good work done.

8:22 - Aaaaaand, so much for "began to".

8:23 - NOOOOOOOO! The next one is "beginning to"! ARRRGH. I AM NOT DONE.

8:23: btw, the last two are bad because they're usually wordy. Sometimes you want to indicate the start of a process that's going to take awhile (i.e., "the fog began to dissipate"), but usually you can replace a phrase that uses "beginning to" with a single, strong verb (i.e., "it began to rain" with "it rained").

8:28 - words that are not "can" that I found while searching for "can": canopy, scandalous, cantaloupes ("there were cantaloupes in the story?" asks my husband), canvas, vacant, canoes, candy, canyon, scanned, American.

8:32 - stopping for the evening. Here's my weasel word list progress as it currently stands:

-about, actually, agreed, almost, all at once, answer, answered, appears, approximately, asked, basically, began to, beginning to, can, close to, could, decide, decided, even, eventually, exactly, feel, felt, finally, for the most part, hear, heard, immediately, its(vague), just, just then, kind of, like, looks, looked, might, muse, mused, nearly, often, practically, rather, really, realize, realized, reply, replied, said, saw, seemed, seems, sigh, sighed, simply, some, somehow, somewhat, sort of, sound, sounded, started to, starting to, suddenly, sure, that, think, thought, touch, touched, truly, usually, utterly, very, was, watch, watched, well, were, wonder, wondered.

Siiiiiiiigh. I do have a ways to go, don't I? 

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell