Writing Tip and ROW80 Update

I'm still struggling to keep up with my revision schedule, enough to blow it off and just keep swimming. I doubt I'll finish the revisions by the end of the month, but I hope to get halfway. However, I've only added 1 page of revision since Sunday. I think I'm getting a touch of Christmas fever!

On the flip side, my critique group liked the next section of my romantic suspense, Cat's Eyes. I think I've got a pretty solid

foundation at this point. 

For my exercise, I missed one day out of the two since Sunday. 

For my Christmas goals, we didn't get the decorating done, but we're on our way. I must finish some scrapbook pages immediately, and plan to bake over the weekend.

I completed my blog goals of finishing the book review on Protection for Hire - see it HERE - and finishing my first Vlog - see it HERE! I really do love blogging!

I'm in the middle of some intensive revisions. My ms is complete and it's better than its older brother by a long-shot. Still, I have much to accomplish on it. My goal was to revise ten pages per day, but I find I tend to go back over the same ten pages, trying to get them perfect. Which leads me to my writing tip for today.

(No, I'm not tackling perfectionism. Unless there's a couch and a doctor with a notepad.) 

I've actually got a revision list. I've signed up for an editing accountability group through ACFW and the lady leading it mentioned a check list for revisions. I've never used one, but I do tend to list the changes I make after the fact. 

In my first story, passive voice kept me up at nights. I eliminated 3,000 passive verbs. That's a lot of wases! At first happy with the tossing of was and were, I soon became enlightened to could, should, and would. I got away with a few less-used ones, but still tightened many of those as well. After several passes through my manuscript, I wrote down all of the items I checked for and changed. I ended up with 17 revisions. Some of them were easy like changing the name of my town. These are a few of them.

1. Exclamation points - eliminate all or most
2. Eliminate was and were as often as possible, and always when coupled with an -ing verb following
3. Scan for overused words - back, out, started, began, eyes, face, turned, at least (just a few of my precious pets!)
4. Vary sentence beginnings and paragraph beginnings
5. Check sentences starting with The
6. Check sentences starting with pronouns
7. Check sentence endings - use strong words
8. Reduce it, that, these, those, this

With my current revision, I'm using my list above. Once I pass through my chapters for these topics, I've come up with a few new, harder topics to deal with. 

1. Flow of scene - does the tension amp up and fade? (Ebb and flow, but I don't live on the coast.)
2. Cliff hanger - do I offer bookmark pages, or does the action keep pulling readers back inside?
3. Heroine - Have I gotten deep enough into her psyche to allow readers to feel what she's feeling?
4. Hero - Have I been faithful to a male POV. Does my character ring true?
5. Are my characters consistent? If not, is there a good reason for the inconsistency?
6. Avoiding minutia - I'm a detail person, but stating the number of steps someone took or defining the exact shade of blue on a table cloth doesn't make for very interesting reading. 
7. Showing vs. Telling - for me, this is an intentional trip through my chapters, analyzing a sentence at a time to evaluate whether it works. Have I crawled into POV deeply enough?
8. Head-hopping and author intrusion need to go on this list, though I don't often have to deal with those issues.

What are the pet problems you have to look out for in your writing?