I’ve gone through my manuscript and purged it of unnecessary ‘ing’ words. I tend to write very ‘present’ (may be due to my ‘method’ writing.. possibly) which is fine but I have a habit of doing that very naughty mistake. Here are a couple of examples
Example Which should actually be
‘I was riding really fast’ ‘I rode really fast’
‘David was wishing she’d hurry up’ ‘David wished she’d hurry up’
So a minor victory! Yay. Now I just have to go back through it and check my use of the word ‘were’ and ‘grinned’. I noticed an over use of both in the document. That and I have put double spaces between sentences in dialogue and apparently you don’t so I need to fix that too. My friends are teasing me for being pedantic but after some of the horrid reviews I read on Amazon on other self-published work I’d rather be safe than sorry! Of course I know there will be people who won’t like it, I am prepared for that I’d just prefer that they can’t fault the workmanship too much *sigh*
Good for you!
Sounds like you are doing a top notch job of sorting and improving. Good luck!
Congratulations, sounds like a job well done!
I TOTALLY need to stop the double space thing. I heard about that years ago in a class I took for work. But that's how I learned to type. How do you undo 25 years of conditioning?
Yay!! Good for you!!! Take care
x
So many things to think about! I also double-click like crazy. My kids comment on it all the time.
Hey, better safe than sorry, and it proves you're doing your research. Bravo!
Thanks for commenting on my blog.
I maintain a list of "banned words" that I try to avoid at all costs. But I always find those -ing words creeping into my writing:
Painted women occupied those high walkways, waving down to the men, occasionally dropping a handkerchief if a man showed the least interest.
Compare to:
Painted women occupied those high walkways, waved down to the men, and occasionally dropped a handkerchief if a man showed the least interest.
For some reason I get a better visual with the first. Maybe I'm wrong but I'm not convinced -ing is all bad.