After a year of silence here, I’m finally back to confirm that I’m still alive and excited to be saying goodbye to 2021.
An Improvement Over 2020.
In defense of what has been, to my mind, a really crap year, I must confess that it was an improvement over the previous year. I had no broken feet, my immediate family are all on the same side of the daisies, and it’s been quite a productive year on everything except for the book.
Things I Actually Got Done.
I spent a lot of time on these and other projects, but nothing on the book.
What’s The Story With The Story?
I did get a single Beta Reader last year and, before the year had closed out, I’d taken action based on his feedback. He didn’t read too far into the story – maybe it’s just not his type of story – but he did highlight that I had a problem with echo words.
‘Echo words’ are simply words that you use more than you probably should. Heck, my blog posts are probably full of them. Probably.
The one instance he highlighted had the word ‘appear’ appearing to appear three times in a single, short, paragraph, in one form or another.
So, being the nerdy, code minded freak that I am, I cobbled together a C# app that looks for words in close proximity. How close? You get to tell it. Anyway, it churns out a HTML file with the candidate echo words colored. Obviously words like ‘and’ and ‘the’ show up a lot, along with others, but I can just ignore those.
That was before I got overloaded and simply had no time to spare.
Next year I plan on making things different.
Welcome, 2022.
I have three goals for the upcoming year.
Goal 1.
Get The Watching into print.
- Finish a final self-edit.
- Get a professional edit and rework.
- Get a cover from a commissioned artist
- Get the thing in print.
Goal 2.
Build and fly an autonomous drone.
Goal 3.
Get livestock on the property.
Happy New Year.
Stay safe, have a wonderful New Year, and spend more time with those you love.
Categories: New Year, Plans & Planning
Andrew Wellington 
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