If you have any energy can you spare some?  I’m beat!

The last several days my low back pain has been gradually increasing as has my neck pain.  Last evening I was barely able to climb the stairs.  Every one of the thirteen stairs going up felt like someone was pushing a dagger into my low back.  In all my time with back pain I don’t recall stairs being a major issue.  I think the neck is exacerbated by stress, as always.

Today I managed to start typing what I had handwritten on Sunday and I’m already at 1,100+ words which means MANY words will end up on the chopping block.  I have to work within 1,500 words.  I can do it but I think I needed to develop more backstory for my character and then be able to go from there.

After all these years putting words on the chopping block isn’t easy.  I think most of us feel like every word we have put on the page has some meaning and we don’t want to take the scissors to any of them in case our message loses the meaning.

I know it’s something I have done repeatedly and though it’s not easy, it gets easier if nothing else.  You learn to say the same thing with fewer words.  The one thing I use all the time is the Synonym feature in Word.  It allows me to click on a word and it lists the alternatives… I sometimes have to use this as I tend to search for words that my 40+ year old brain doesn’t want to push to the surface.

That’s another story and, perhaps, I’ll save it for another post!

I am a big fan of NCIS and there was a post on Facebook about Ziva’s return in the fall and I wanted to reach into the article and shake out all the edits that it required.  NCIS will be in Season 17 in the fall and the writer, at one point, referred to the new Season 7.  CRINGE! Of course there were plenty of other errors and I had to stop reading.

So go find something to edit, whether it’s yours or it belongs to someone else.