It's Just Out of Control

After my last post, I wanted to see how often I used—ah, overused—the words just, simply, and definitely.

The results are telling:

Conventional Demon: Total Word Count 94,000

• Simply: 22 times
• Definitely: 40 times
• Just: 244 times

Two hundred forty-four times! That's insane.

But I've come a long way as an author since CD, right? I wrote three books, then I wrote Eva. So I should be well aware of my problem and have fixed it as I wrote, right? Well, at least partially.

Eva: Total Word Count 119,000

• Simply: 13 times
• Definitely: 13 times
• Just: 272 times

I just found a very easy way to cut at least 150 words from this novel. Sweet! 

(Out of curiosity, I checked Faye, the novel that bloated out of proportion to 250,000 words and went off the rails. Total number of times I used just in that novel: 491. Number of times I cut just from this blog: 4. Seriously, I might need an intervention.)