JESSA SLADE and Her Hero, ARCHER!

Look who's with us today! Jessa Slade has dropped by (or not exactly dropped, more like banged on the door because I over-slept) with her hero Ferris Archer from her new debut release, SEDUCED BY SHADOWS. And if you ever thought you'd never be seduced by a dark and dangerous demon-possessed hunk, think again. Because Archer, winner of ISOH's Most Deliciously Tortured Hero Award, has arrived.

And here's your chance to win a free copy of this fabulous new book, to set you onto a brand new form of addiction in Urban Fantasy. Just read and follow instructions at the bottom of our interview.

Jessa Slade: Hi, Delle. Thank you so much for letting me guest post with you today. You’ve given me the chance to hunt down the hero of my debut urban fantasy romance SEDUCED BY SHADOWS. Ferris Archer—an immortal warrior possessed by a repentant demon—has been a busy boy since the book hit the shelves at the beginning of this month and I’ve been curious how he’s handling the sudden exposure.

So please welcome to “In Search of Heroes”—

Archer: Where’s my shirt?

Jessa: I... Uh, sorry, what?

Archer: You wanted to know how I’m handling the exposure. I’m asking where you put my shirt.

Jessa: Oh, well, technically, your shirt isn’t my responsibility. That would be the cover artists and—

Archer: It’s November in Chicago. Rocking a leather jacket without a shirt is no easy task in Chicago in November.

Jessa (slightly peeved): I’m sure you’ve faced tougher challenges, my dear hero.

Archer: I’m not a hero.

Jessa (smug): That’s what all the real heroes say.

Archer (with a flat stare): I’m not a hero.

Jessa (backpedaling slightly): Not at the beginning of the book, perhaps. In fact, you called yourself garbage man to the damned. But the mission you and the other alpha male fighters undertook with the help of the repentant demons inside you was to save the world, destroying evil one gnarly bit at a time. What else would it take to make you a hero?

Archer: Most of the time, it’s not clear the world wants to be saved. Dragging it back from the brink against its will makes me a fool or a bully, not a hero.

Jessa: Are you always so optimistic?

Archer: Only on my good days.

Jessa: But you’re having good days now, now that you’ve found Sera Littlejohn, the first female possessed in the living memory of your band of not-so-merry men.

Archer (gaze softening): Yes.

Jessa (eyes rolling): By ‘yes’ I assume you mean you’re groovy without your shirt when she’s around?

Archer: She stripped everything else from me, why not my shirt along with my isolation, my fatalism, and my suicidal demon-slaying fury? Death and damnation seemed inevitable before her.

Jessa: And she took that away from you? How rude.

Archer: No kidding. Do you know how hard it is to maintain the required demon-slayer level of angst and arrogance when just the sight of her makes me melt inside?

Jessa: Hmm, I know you fought against it for an unholy number of pages.

Archer: Fighting is the only thing I knew for almost two centuries. I’d gotten damned good at it. Giving in... That was much riskier.

Jessa: I guess that’s what all you reluctant heroes lack—the love of a good woman to set you on the right path.

Archer (wryly): That was love? A boot kick in the ass that sends me sprawling in the middle of that path?

Jessa: When you need it, yeah. With the whole world relying on you, the battle of good and evil raging around you, weren’t the stakes high enough?

Archer: Perhaps too high. I may be talyan—a man possessed by a repentant demon—but I’m still just a man. The powers of good and evil that invade our world are just a reflection of the good and evil invading every soul. If after a few millennia the world still haven’t found a balance between dark and light, what chance does one man have?

Jessa: But for Sera, you took that chance. Love conquers all.

Archer: Which explains the scars.

Jessa: Yeah, sorry about that. At least the black leather pants hide the evidence. Thanks for baring your souls and various other manly bits today, Archer. I’m sure we’ll see you around in the other novels of The Marked Souls.

Archer: If I had a shirt you’d see less of me.

Jessa: Don’t hold your breath, man.

Read Chapter 1 of SEDUCED BY SHADOWS at http://jessaslade.com
For a short story prequel to the world of the Marked Souls, visit http://tinyurl.com/MarkedSoulsPrequel

Want a chance to win a signed copy of SEDUCED BY SHADOWS? Leave a comment about the riskiest thing you’ve done to avoid love or embrace it.

IT ISN'T WRITER'S BLOCK- IT'S OPPORTUNITY

It's a sad fact for almost all authors that sometimes their writing gets stalled. We usually call it Writers' Block. Or we talk about the Muse having deserted us.

Writers tend to whip themselves unmercifully, especially when they aren't being productive. No matter how they rationalize, re-frame or euphemize, they are really blaming themselves. Nothing feels more helpless to a writer, because when writing is blocked, productivity dies. A physician doesn't say, "My Muse has left me today", but there's a reason. He is calling upon his accumulated knowledge more than on new insight. A runner doesn't claim his legs just won't work today. Because they will. They might not be up to top speed, but they move. But when a writer is blocked, the brain just isn't making the connections that allow work to flow.

Mental creativity is a very different activity. Other things, like a base of accumulated knowledge, are required for new creativity, but usually the formulation of new fiction has to come from a different part of the brain. And all kinds of things can interrupt or interfere. All writers run into the problem in some form or another, and they all fear it. Getting around it, over it, under it, or through it can be simple, or it can be a monumental struggle.

Writing is one of the most difficult jobs a person can do. In the initial phase of a writer's career, she often feels the free flow of new ideas, the amazing exhilaration that comes along with a new story, characters who jump to life on the page, and a setting that gains reality even as the words come out- it often seems so easy. The author believes in her own genius (she should, because it's real). But she doesn't know, and probably can't grasp at this moment that she has just been suckered in to the most difficult job she will ever try to do.

Soon she'll reach the hard part. Soon she'll learn her first wonder-creating efforts are full of flaws-- naive writing, plot inconsistencies, characters without motivation, or other things that could make her story a financial success. (Discounting those few authors who actually do sell their first story right away, of course.) She'll begin to realize there is no such thing as a perfect story, and yet she must always strive to reach perfection.

But she's hooked. She sets herself on a course to learn to write better. She takes courses, attends workshops, reads books, studies other authors, meets with and shares experiences with other authors. She now is learning the actual craft of writing, which takes her creativity to new heights.

When she really starts to get good is when she discovers the work getting harder. Nothing wrong with that. But she may also feel like her ideas are drying up. Probably not. More likely, she has learned to discard the initial ones that are the easy way out- the trite solutions. She's learned not to manipulate her characters into doing something abnormal for them just because she wants them to do it. She now plots more carefully, more accurately, and doesn't just stick in a scene, because she now knows a scene must be a logical consequence of previous action, not just another event.

All of this is harder. Just plain harder. Now that beautiful, euphoric glow of creativity must co-exist with hard core, down-to-earth writing skill and technique. She's reached the point where she understands that good story telling is hard work.

This is when she will run into real problems and few solutions. She feels like the beautiful creativity has dried up. She starts battering herself with her own insecurities. Is she a has-been? Did she never 'have it' in the first place? She feels like a fraud, because she should be producing, but isn't.

Usually this is also the point when outside influences can interfere more. Most writers have many other obligations and distractions. Their multi-tasking abilities could already be taxed to the limit, when here comes one more. Concentration wanes. New ideas just don't come. Self flagellation increases.

The reality: Creative work is different from other kinds of work. As we learn and hone new skills to create better and better work, we are setting ever higher standards for ourselves. We can't accept the work we did when we were first beginning because now we know how to do better. We must now aim for higher, better goals. Those easy solutions we found when we were so ignorant are no longer acceptable. Now we strive not just for a story but for THE story, the best story.

And finding the best story is hard. It's simply not the same thing. Our writing job has changed. If writing is easy, then we need to be wary of it. It may not be the best we can do. The trite plot solution is the one that's easy to find. Anyone could think of it. It's the first thing that pops into a person's mind. Sometimes it's exactly the right solution. That's fine. But a book full of easy, trite solutions is of little interest. The answers that are hard to find are often the ones that give a book its unique twist and make it exciting.

When a story suddenly comes to a grinding halt, it's not because the author has lost her ability to create. Instead, she has reached a point of opportunity. It's her chance to dig very deep, work very hard, to find the one thing that will take her story out of the realm of the ordinary. It's her chance to find the magic world that really is her own creation, to find the unique and unexpected twist that takes her story beyond the boundaries of ordinary living into the extraordinary world fiction readers want.

So when you reach an insurmountable block in your writing, look at it as an opportunity. Time to work really, really hard, to dig, explore, search, experiment. Give yourself permission to try things that won't work, so you can study those and see if they subtly point to the path of something that might lead you to yet another path, knowing that each path, though it may not take you where you want to go, will show you something else that might change everything.

If story-telling were easy, anyone could do it. And no one would care.

Home Invader? Bandit? Or Just too friendly?

Before I get on with today's tale, I'd like to impart some Breaking News! Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, who you may remember from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, was the free-style disco champion of the whole of Derbyshire for a dozen years. Because "Gentlemen do not Conga". Don't believe me? Below is the proof, in this video by Mitchell & Webb:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTchxR4suto

Now on with today's blog, about a weird little incident:

My favorite writing place is in my second-story bedroom, sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop. It's close to a window to the back yard, with nice fresh air and plenty of light this time of year. In winter, it's like a connection with the rest of the world.


You can see in this photo the ceiling is vaulted and the upper window is half-circular, over a 60 inch wide main window. And notice, the distance from lower window to roof is at least four feet. There are no outside ledges.

Our cats, such as Jinx, shown here, have also always loved this window, where they can look down on the back yard, and when it's open, sit in the breeze and chase birds in their imaginations. After replacing the screen four times over the years, I've gotten lax, knowing it would have fresh kitty claw marks in no time. It really needs to be done badly, but it's become just one more thing to fix someday.

The big weeping white pine outside the window has grown taller than the house, and now and then Jinx is more than usually interested in it because a huge, fat brown squirrel roams up the tree and onto the roof, where I can hear him scampering. I'm guessing it's the feast of pine nuts that has made him so big and chubby. He's often down on the deck or roaming around on the beams where we hang plants, and he and Jinx eye each other with wary interest. He must weigh several pounds and is probably half again the size of a normal squirrel. (This pic isn't my squirrel, who seems to be hiding from me now. But he looks a lot like mine. And note the paws.)

Yesterday I was hard at work polishing a manuscript when I heard that familiar sound of a cat clawing on the screen, and I yelled at Jinx. But I looked up and she wasn't there. Then I heard the noise again so I got up to look, and spotted a new snag in the screen.

As I stood at the window, close up, suddenly this little gray paw reached out right in front of my eyes. "Why, you little rascal!" I said, and the paw withdrew and vanished. Remember the squirrel in ICE AGE? That's what it looked like.

And yes, the tear in the screen was just a little bit bigger.

I went outside and I've looked and looked at that tree, and can't see how he did it. There is one branch almost close enough, since most are too distant, but it's very skinny. And he could only have done it if he weighs enough to bend the branch down. Even at that, he must have a really long reach. The little critter was trying to trapeze his way to my window!

Does he want to get into the house? Is he just curious? Or is he getting a bit too friendly? Maybe hearing my voice scared him off. He often just watches me when I'm out on the deck, but other times he's skittered away when he heard me coming out the door. I hope he doesn't ever really latch onto the screen because I don't know how he'd get down without about a 15 foot fall.

Back when I was a kid, we lived in Olney, Illinois, the Home of the White Squirrel, and we had a squirrel that would actually come in the house for a treat, until one day she was freaked by a noise and ran across my baby sister to get out. We never saw her again. So I've always been partial to squirrels. But I really don't want them in my house. I know too much about the critters, you see, and they can be as bad as coons when trapped inside.

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: Vivid Imagery in Your Narrative

CURRENT WORK: Finishing up a cover art project today.
MOOD: Is groggy a mood? Read a book too late last night.
UPDATE: Hubby bowled 623 in 3 games last night. He's not so old after all!
*****

I'm reading a great book right now that totally hods my interest. I'll tell you all about it later this month, but right now, let me just say it's IMMORTAL OUTLAW by Lisa Hendrix, and it's an excellent example of my subject today.

I've read a lot of manuscripts lately that ought to be wonderful, at least in having a good plot and intriguing characters, yet somehow don't excite me. Personally I think that's fixable, where a story that has no conflict or character growth has to be completely re-thought. The story with the right skeleton can be fleshed out but a boneless body really can't move much, no matter how pretty the flesh. So let's talk about how to make the writing more exciting.

The first thing that comes to my mind is passive writing- I think because I've also seen a lot of that lately. I've caught myself doing it, too. I think it's something most of us do because it's part of everyday speech.

An explanation: Passive writing, passive voice and passive verbs are not the same thing, but they're related. Passive verbs are verbs that don't do any action, they simply "are". Zen-like. Passive voice occurs when the sentence is "written backwards" so to speak, and the subject is treated as the object. "It was written by me." instead of "I wrote it." Again, the passiveness takes over and makes the first sentence feel flat.

Passive writing involves all of these things and more. The work takes on a Zen-like inactivity. (Zen has its value as a state of mind, but genre fiction needs its opposite, action, to achieve its purpose.) Conflict is softened. The Black Moment is mitigated until it is sort of dove gray. The story loses its tautness and meanders, as if it can't find its purpose.

To me, passive writing also includes choosing words that lack a vivid sense. This includes verbs, nouns and modifiers. We can add our modifiers to them, but it's better if the main word bears most of the load. Often when I can't seem to get a visual of the scene, or the characters don't dance before my eyes, its because nothing in their descriptions has caught my imagination. They "move", but they don't "frolic". There's often a lot of thinking going on, but little of it is recollection of vivid scenes.

Sometimes those mental gyrations can be made vivid. As I was writing this, I remembered this scene as an example. Instead of Ned thinking about his twin sister's death, he recalls this scene:

Ned saw in his mind the newly green slope of parkland that ran down to the brook. Cecily laughed, no, giggled, as they ran together, each with a homemade kite, and she could not get hers into the air. He'd had to stop and do it for her, while she held his. But the minute he had her kite airborne, she squealed with delight and forgot about the one she had been holding for him. It slipped from the sky, tumbled limply downward and crashed against a rock.

Lots of internal thought is very hard on a story. That's because it lacks action. It lies either in the past or in the future, and so it doesn't have the intensity of the present. But in a scene like this, the memory Ned has of Cecily is one of action, so it SHOWS the memory as if it were right now, not so many years ago. Never does he think how much he still loves and misses his twin. But we know.

Adrienne de Wolfe once told me, "Enough of the brown horse! We know he's brown. You only need to say it once." Yes, every time I'd mentioned the horse, he'd been "brown horse". But it was not another word for brown I needed. Think about how much more vivid it would have been to show things about the horse's unique way of moving, the way it tossed its head, or plodded. The horse was no major actor in my story, but he could have added to the dramatic vitality of the knight who rode him if I had not portrayed him like a horse in a child's coloring book.

SHOW, DON'T TELL is the best way to make a story vivid. But I neglected some really important things in the paragraph above: the other four senses. We can see the mane tossing in the wind. But we need sprinklings of the other senses as well. Horses make all kinds of noises. Our hands running over their coats feel their sleekness, but if we rub the other way, they become bristly. We can scent them, for horses don't smell the same as pigs or cows. We can smell the dust their hooves churn into the air as they run. Dust, we can even taste. Use of the other senses beyond sight and hearing need to be used more sparingly, and all such details need to be chosen carefully and not over-used. I try to avoid more than one detail at a time because too much description can over-load a scene and bog it down.

Women, I think, write this way more often than men, but I could be wrong. I read mostly women's work. But I think we go overboard trying to get our points across. We seem to be afraid we haven't got our point across so we try to re-phrase it. Then we explain it. A recent paragraph in a manuscript I read had the heroine first think about what she was going to say, then say it. Then she showed her thoughts with her body language. Then she had a narrative paragraph following explaining why this had happened. If you want to bore me, this is how to do it. ell it to me once, one way, then get on with the story.

SAVE THE PROLOGUE! Making Your Prologue Do Its Job

CURRENT PROJECT:
3 full book covers for print books.
And a new, exciting ending for FAERIE.
MOOD: Goal-oriented and focused.
UPDATE: Kitty is doing very well after her surgery, and a cooling fan/laptop stand has saved my crashing laptop. Unfortunately I will be too broke for awhile to buy the bigger hard drive I need so badly.
*********

Saving Prologues can't come close to the importance of fighting fires and saving lives, but I chose this photo to symbolize my topic today, mostly in honor and awe of the amazing fire-fighters who are battling the dangerous blazes in California and around the country right now.

So, what do I mean by 'Save the Prologue? I've told so many authors over the years to ditch their prologues. Why? And why, in spite of that, do I write prologues in my stories?

Prologues aren't bad things. They are just frequently mis-used. They, in fact more hinder a stry than help it. And truthfully, I've mis-used them myself, but always for what I considered a good reason. Not the first one I wrote, though. It was beautiful. Fabulous. It also got in the way of the story. And that right there is the one most important reason to not keep a prologue.

The real question, then, is what do I mean about getting in the way of the story? How does a prologue work, or not work? How can you tell if it is good for the story or not?

By definition, a prologue comes before the story. That makes it the dreaded "backstory". Once upon a time when reading was one of very few forms of entertainment available, people liked long, sometimes slow-paced books. That meant longer time could be spent enjoying them. Much of earlier fiction is like this.

If you pick up THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, for instance, you'll go through 17 pages in the beginning that elaborate history, characters and how they came to be in the area, family trees, and so on. There might be more- I don't know. That's as far as I got with the book on two separate tries. I know there's a great story there. I just didn't have the patience to get to it.

Contrast that with today's action movies and TV, or fast-paced adventure stories. Think of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER by Tom Clancy. Movie or book, it was gripping from the outset. The book did it better than the movie, in my opinion, but that's because a movie actually needs a little bit of time to get the audience settled in their seats and transported into the movie's world. The audience is captive simply because they went to all this trouble and expense to get there, and they aren't about to walk out. But a book can always be picked up later, so it's easier to put down.

Back story isn't story. Simple as that. If it's story, it isn't truly a prologue. If a book starts out with the history behind the story, not only is the reader getting restless in her seat, she's often being told ahead of time something that can be withheld and create suspense, and therefore be much more intriguing if revealed later, possibly as a secret unveiled. If you tell me in the opening of the book the one thing that makes the story a story, why would I want to read the whole book just to see that unfold? Maybe I would in some books, but I honestly can't think of any.

But when does a prologue work?

A prologue must be intriguing, so much so that the reader simply must continue reading into the story. That means a story question is set up, not aswered. It can be a short history lesson for the story, but only if it fulfills this requirement. It must contribute something valuable to the story, and it must not block any other part of the story.

I used one in APHRODITE'S BREW, first because this is a light, humorous book and I needed a humorous opening. I did need to explain why such a brave and dauntless hero, not to mention loyal, clean, reverent and dutiful, could be driven to hide in Bath just at harvest time when he loved most being home. And the reader needed to see for herself just how scheming and determined his match-making mama was that he could be caught off guard and have to flee to save his hide from matrimony. And the reader needed to know why and how much he detested scandal.

Backstory. Every bit of it. But it's full of action and decision, and character development, all of which lead directly into the story. I didn't want to hide this information and reveal it later because unless the reader knows these things, she might see the hero as a silly wimp. She'd know better later, but that's too late.

In my current work, FAERIE, which is a medieval paranormal romance, I need the prologue to help develop the interface between fantasy and reality. Building the world in a fantasy sometimes takes up more room, but it's still a romance so I can't take up much. The scene takes place between two secondary but very important characters who are deciding something about the hero, who stands close by, unsuspecting that his entire life is about to be changed by a promise broken and another fulfilled. The reader may get the feeling of suspense, and when the old crone leaves by walking through the wall, the paranormal theme is firmly set.

It's backstory to the true plot. But it fits in directly with the next scene, the first chapter, which ties hero and heroine, plus the two secondary characters, the king and the crone, together.

In my vampire story, DAMNED AND DANGEROUS, though, the prologue became a first chapter because it is the true beginning. It's when my "Hero's Hero" protagonist meets the vampyr and the dilemma my hero must resolve begins.

That's the clue: A story begins when the story's first conflict is set forth. I like my romances best if hero and heroine can meet in the first chapter, but often when the secondary plot line is very strong, that doesn't work out as well. In adventure stories, or strongly paranormal stories, those other elements have to fit in well, and this can slow down the romance. Sometimes establishing the story world in a prologue can accomplish this. It's a trade-off, and sometimes a very difficult balance to achieve.

It's best if a prologue is very short. A maximum of three pages. And yes, I broke that rule too. I'd say, if you're having trouble deciding whether the beginning is a prologue or a first chapter, go for the first chapter if you can. If you can't be sure to re-evaluate it, in particular asking yourself if you're giving away anything you can withhold and reveal later for better effect.

In other words, a successful prologue must do one thing: move the story forward, not explain the past. If it does this, and especially if it propels the story better because of it, that's when you should keep it.

Too Many excuses

And too bad they're real...
Computer crashing- can't keep it up more than a few minutes
Sick cat back from vet- hiding from me
Hubby's hotel reservation screwed up- I have to fix it- With no computer
Overdue cover art project- lost file in crash but retrieved it finally
Did I mention headache? Wonder why?
Back tomorrow

SEARCH AND DESTROY! Editing Your Manuscript

No, this is not about war- only about the war with words that a manuscript sometimes becomes.

I spent all morning looking for a photo of a World War I dogfight, or a World War II fighter. I prefer buying images to be sure I'm not violating anyone's copyright. But the only suitable images I found would cost me $30! There are some things I'm not willing to do for a blog, and that's one of them.

So instead I'm giving you this one of the cavalry approaching Vittoria in 1813. They're both symbolic of the editing process I'm going to describe.

Ever get into one of those situations with your story where you wonder if you'll ever get the manuscript clean enough to submit? Are the little things getting you down? You've got the thing in a good sequential order, and you're happy with the goals, motivation, conflict, dialogue, and all that major stuff, but you still keep running across those nit-picky things that make you pound the flat of your hand against your forehead.

You need Search and Destroy. It's a systematic approach to error elimination that can be tailored to your own particular writing quirks.

Search and Destroy, hereinafter called S&D, is really a more sophisticated Find and Replace. On my PC, it's called up with the F2 key. Word Perfect uses (Ctl+f), in the Edit Menu, and Word divides it into Find (Ctl+f) and Replace, which also gets you there. (F2 is easier.)

You knew all that. But did you know how many ways you can use this when editing?

Well, first, you have to have some kind of idea what you're trying to replace. Are you a passive writer, over-using passive voice instead of active in your stories? An easy way to find this is to keep a list of the passive words you most often use. Start out with all forms of the verb 'to be', and then do a search for each one. In fiction, 'was' is probably the most common, so start with it, then analyze each sentence that comes up. Is this a legitimate use of 'was', or should the sentence be re-worded?

Often with passive phrasing, the subject and object of the sentence need to be reversed. Although you won't find all examples by searching for 'to be' words, you'll catch a lot of them. Then learn through observing your own writing what other words you commonly use in passive construction. Add those to your S&D list.

If you have a tendency toward certain crutch words, S&D can save you. This is where your S&D list comes in most handy.

My Crutch Word list includes:
oh
well
just
then
that
and (starting a sentence)
but (also starting sentences)
suddenly
brilliant
magnificent
silver (why are all my clouds silver???)
bunches of words relating to passion which I over-use,
and recently, for some reason, furtively

Speaking of 'furtively', it's an adverb. I now search for all '-ly' words. Not that they're bad words- they aren't. But it's very easy to use an adverb with a weak verb, and thus weaken my whole sentence. For example: "He moved furtively along the canal. . ."

That brings me to weak verbs. Moved, turned, etc are weak because they are so vague, they don't evoke an image in the reader's mind. 'Walked' might be better because at least we know it's done on two feet at a moderate pace. But verbs like 'sneaked' or 'crept' are specific enough for the reader to envision the movement. Sure, adding 'furtively' to 'moved' gives a mental picture, but combining the two into one strong word improves pacing in scenes that need to be tight. Fewer syllables have a sharper impact. If he is 'sneaking' or 'creeping', you don't make the mistake of thinking he's 'strolling', 'striding' or 'ambling'.

On my Weak Verb list are:
moved
motioned
turned
walked
sat
stood
crossed
moved to (I HATE this! It says almost nothing!)
told
looked
saw

Any of these might be perfectly all right, but my very long list keeps me looking at them to be sure.

And then there are the Cliches:

massive oak desk (table) (aren't they all?)
voluminous skirts (aren't they all???)
elegantly curved lips (maybe it's just me, but I sure over-use this one)
fuzzy bunny slippers, usually pink (not me. I don't do fuzy slippers of any kind)

Make your own list, and keep adding to it. Every time you come across a really great way of saying something, better make a note of it because before you know it, you'll use it again and again and again. You'll create your own cliche! And it could be one of those 'once a book is enough' words.

I've even used the S&D approach to check my punctuation. I hate it when I come across a contest entry that has variously one and two spaces between sentences, then here and there five spaces, likely created by using Tab. But after having laboriously re-trained myself years ago to change from one space between sentences to two, recently I decided to go back to one. (It no longer connotes 'unprofessional', as it did years ago.) Funny how it's harder to go back. So now every time I finish a chapter I run it through S&D, searching for PERIOD SPACE SPACE and replacing with PERIOD SPACE. I repeat the process for question and exclamation marks. But also I have to check for quotes ending sentences, such as END QUOTE, PERIOD SPACE SPACE. It doesn't really take long and it gives me just a little more peace of mind.

And then there's the ellipsis. Those three dots... Well, actually they should be. . .
And how about scene breaks? Searching for them quickly finds one that lost its center justification for some reason.
I also check to be sure each chapter starts off in the same format- same number of spaces down from the top of the page, etc.

Oh, one more thing. Years ago I put a manuscript in the mail, certain it had been polished to perfection. I went home, where I picked up a copy I'd left on my desk, and on the very last line of the first page, I spotted: "She looked through the sex-paned window to the courtyard below. . ."
So now I search for 'sex' too.

So tell me, what words, phrases or cliches would you add to your Search and Destroy list?