"I just want you to know/ That I've been fighting to let you go"

Alright, so. For the past couple of weeks I have been working on my book. I know, I know. Who am I to write a book? Good question. I really don't know. But I'll never know if I don't find out. No one else is going to write my idea down for me. So might as well give it shot.

So that being said, writing a novel is amazingly difficult. And my number one problem is repetition. I never realized before how many times I used the word "just" when writing. And it is ironic because it is a word I was taught to never use. In my high school AP English class, Mr. B (also my favorite teacher in H.S. and one of the two most influential teachers of my life) required weekly in-class essays on whatever literary work we were reading at the time (Middlemarch, David Copperfield, Invisible Man, and lots of Shakespeare comes to mind). There were several rules that we were required to follow or points would be deducted from our grade. These are rules I still used when writing papers in college (come on sisters, let's see if these jog your memory or if you can add any):

1. Always use the author's name, the title of the work, and the genre (novel, play, etc) in the opening sentence (or at the very least, your first paragraph) of your paper

2. You never used the words really, a lot, just, there or very in your paper.

Like I said, I still used these rules when I wrote papers in college. Every single one. The first rule was easy to follow (and a good way not to stress over how to start a paper) but the second rule always tripped me up. "There" and "just" always got me. I swear, I would even reread my essay before handing it in and one of those two words was always tucked away somewhere. "Very" used to give me problems too, but I learned to replace it with "extremely". I tried to replace "just" with "simply" but sometimes I forgot. Hey, I'm not perfect.

But that was academic writing, fictional writing is totally different, right? I mean you have to use "there" and "very" when you're writing a novel. But "just" is still the word that just (see?)... bothers me. I use it entirely too much and I don't know why. I'm trying to eliminate it from whatever sentence I'm writing and see if it still makes sense. But I'm struggling. Great, now I feel like "just" is the secret word of the day and I am extremely aware of it. Pee Wee Herman is going to start jumping out and screaming whenever I type it. Sometimes simply just doesn't cut it. Okay that was sort of on purpose, but see-- eliminate "just" from that short sentence and it's not as good!

Oh and another fun story: Due to the fact I typed at least 40+ papers on this laptop throughout the course of my college career, my name is deeply entrenched in my Microsoft Word's memory. So, that being said, you know how if you start to type "Nov", Word will automatically suggest "November" or if you type "Mon" it suggests "Monday" (you know, to save you the hard task of hitting four more keys). Now whenever I start to type annoy or any of its derivatives, the suggested word is "Annie". I am beginning to think I should read more into this. Well, at the very least, it makes me sad. Like my computer is trying to tell me something. Don't hate me Mac. I've been so good to you all these years.