Okay, today's a home brewed cup of Starbuck's coffee with French vanilla creamer, and I think it's going to be a more-than-two-cups kind of day. I've been sick for six days and my head felt like a big boulder rocking on top of a skinny stick. I'd get up to write and have to stop and rest. So now that I'm better, I'm diving into my final edit (until further notice) of my current WIP.

So here's the thing, I have a list of words that I tend to use often. One of them being glance. All my characters are glancing here and there and up and down that they all seem to have an annoying tick. I did a search for glance in my pages, and the result was well over 260 in my novel. This had come up with a conversation I had with a fellow writer on Twitter. Her over used word was nod. A couple of novels that I've critiqued used smile all the time that their characters resembled the Cheshire Cat. As writers we tend to get too close to our work and can't see the technical beyond the creative of our writing. The technical is just as important as the creative. We want our readers to be in the story and not stumble over all our writing ticks.

Since discovering my tick, I've whittled down my glances considerably, and my story flows better. I also searched other writers' tick words in my novel and found a few I didn't even know I had over used. That's the beauty of discussing your work with others, you discover weaknesses you never knew you had. So what's your irritating tick word?

That's it. Slurp! (Yuck. Cold. I need to top off my coffee.)