An extra writerly ways

[cornerofmadness]

Me, today. OMG enough with the time change (You know this never bothered me until my late 40s).

First off, THANK YOU for all your input on yesterday's writerly ways. It's been helpful.


So let me talk a little today about the epithet and my crown as the queen of them. I'm not sure what my problem with them is. I even tend to think in terms of them. That's one of the things I'm editing out of my old fanfic but I'm just as guilty of using them in my current writing but at least now I realize just how bad they are.

What brought this home was me rereading Hyperion's Son for the millionth time (I know, I KNOW, I said I was done with it). And last night, half way through it again I realize just how many epithets are STILL in the goddamn thing. In this Gunn and Fred have a seven year old son and in one paragraph I referred to him as 'the boy' SIX times, instead of calling him Josh or he.

Now this truly is at least the seventh time through this since August. HOW could I miss so much of this? You know when I first read this I thought, hey you know this thing is still pretty good after all these years. Now I'm looking at it thinking this is such crap.

And epithets are harder to edit out with a global search. It's easy to put 'just' or 'very' in a search and blow them up in draft two. It's going to be a crap ton harder to go searching for 'the man' 'the boy' 'the vampire' and get them all (because they'll belong in some places). This is where having a beta helps (granted the first half of this did have multiple betas but I think we worried a lot less about this 15 years ago)

Ugh, just ugh. Now I have to go through this again.

So what is your writing weakness? How do you deal with them?