Confession time

Hello. My name is Arlene, and I have a confession. Meg & Matt are real lookers … and I don’t mean that in a good way.

I’m not kidding. I’ve noticed that Meg & Matt spend a lot of time looking — at each other, at the ground, at whatever is around them. Whenever they don’t know what else to do, they LOOK.

Needless to say, I’m going to have to work on that. Admitting there’s a problem is the first step in fixing it, right? 😉

I owe my (not so) startling revelation to one of my RWA sisters. As newsletter editor for NARWA, I have the privilege of receiving articles from all the other RWA chapter newsletters. I review them to decide whether to include them in ours, but I also find myself learning from them whether they end up in our newsletter or not.

One of the articles did include in our most recent issue (in e-mail in boxes today, for those of you looking) was “Hunt those pesky repeated words” by Missouri RWA’s Shawntelle Madison. She confesses to using “snapped,” “noticed” and “saw” too often.

That made me think about the words I use more than I should, and “look” topped my list. At least in “Beauty and the Ballplayer,” they seem to be looking all the time.

At least it’s a problem specific to Meg & Matt. I think I’d have noticed if Kari & Damien or Brad & Erin spent all their time gaping at one another. (Erin spends a fair amount of time staring at Mike, at least at first, but that’s another story!) 😀

What words do you find yourself using more often than you might like?