Ten More Things...

These have been a bit shorter than usually lately and for that I apologize.  I've been preparing a manuscript for submission to an agent and my attention didn't want to be split this week. 

On the bright side, this is also showing me the things that I know, but don't practice, and the things I practice without thinking about. (As an act of self-protection, I'm not going to differentiate between the two) I've been jotting them down as they occur to me and not that I have ten of them (that didn't take long), here's an incomplete list of things to keep in mind as you are editing your manuscript...

1. Adverbs are vampires that suck the life out of verbs.  Delete them.
2. Not every word in your vocabulary was meant to be used.
3. Street people and college professors should not sound the same in dialogue.
4. Don't let your POV character wander offscreen and leave the 'camera' on a non-pov character.
5. "I love this" is not a good enough reason to keep anything.
6. Violence should be succinct and brutal and death should be final.
7. "Well, (insert name of famous author here)  got away with it, so I can too" is the top of a very slippery slope.
8. You are not your characters and your characters are not you. (It's also helpful to remind your family and friends of this from time to time.)
9. Daydreaming about Dan Brown-like success will not get you any closer to Dan Brown-like success.
10. When you get too tired to concentrate, stop.