Life has been relentless recently, but that doesn’t mean I’ve dropped the project.

In fact, I managed to get through a fairly important milestone: I’ve finished going through my list of planned verifications and corrections (what I call my search-and-destroy list.) Those were all the small, but noticeable issues I found while doing my second revision.

For example, I probably tend to probably use “probably” and other adverbs probably too often, probably. So I searched my entire manuscript for every instance of “ly”, and made sure to cut that down to a more reasonable ratio.

You’d be surprised how many small, relatively easy-to-correct issues like that cropped up. Clever constructions that I use more than once, metaphors and similes that are maybe too similar to once another… and of course, even more adverbs, probably.

You would also be surprised at how incredibly annoying fixing that can be. So getting that task out of the way is a pretty great step for me. Now I just have to:

1. Finish my last reading-and-correct (I’m about 40% through);
2. Run the autocorrect through my text, just in case;
3. Touch up my presentation a bit – it’d be stupid to get rejected for purely cosmetic issues;
4. Write and send my queries.

Can that be done in time to start a new manuscript during NaNoWriMo? We’ll see!