Had it.

I’ve spent the last two months revising a novel I wrote about eight years ago. For being the product of my young and impressionable mind (I was sixty), it’s pretty good. Except.

Well, I have this quirk. I use the word “had” a lot. I mean, a lot. I mean at least three times a page, sometimes more.

And it’s a useless word. “I had thought that we were going to…” Why not just say “I thought we were going to…”

“I had a notion that…” Why not just say, “My notion was that…”

At least I never ran up against what I think is an unpardonable sin for a writer: The evil double had.

“But we had had another try at it…”

I see this in published novels! YOu have to try to figure out where the “hads” are and what Had to do what with had…

Don’t know why I do this. Don’t even know if I sprinkle “had” all over my blogs. It’s a nervous tic. It’s a bad habit. It’s something that I don’t notice until I had to…wait, there I go again.

I’ve spent the last two months combing the “had” out of the manuscript like you’d comb a dog for fleas. Most of them are gone. A few remain because, well, they had to be in there…

See what I did there?

Anyway, it took a while to remove the blemishes from the manuscript. But as I hit page 269, I realized I was guilty of another nasty tic: The word “So.”

So what. Maybe no one will notice.