🌻Merrr🌻

I'm going to try it.

First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.

What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.

This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*

If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.

*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.

This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.

For our love is a ghost that the others can't see It's a danger Every shade of us you fade down to keep (And you know what you do to me)

You have to admit that it might of been interesting to have Rowena be his ex wife and not his mom...just his ex who hates his guts and constantly wants to kill him because crap she's stuck with him in her afterlife now...I mean we know nothing about Gavin MacLeod's mom...they very well could have made Rowena be Crowley's ex wife from when he was Fergus. They could have given her the backstory that she was a witch who ditched him and Gavin to pursue her own path...leading to Fergus becoming more of a drunk and probably also pushing him to make his crossroads demon deal (bigger junk means the next woman won't leave me)....

like we know he was a two-bit tailor who was constantly drunk...so it would have made sense that his wife would probably resent him and probably Gavin too...if he was constantly wasted and not the nicest guy then she probably had to be a single mother half the time which builds resentment. She probably would have hated him for not providing for his family and caring more about the drink than anything else...

They could have had her be someone who wanted to live a far finer life than being stuck with Fergus and Gavin would have given her (like make her not the kindest person either...make her grow to hate her life due to dealing with her husband who maybe promised her a nice life only to be a mean poor alcoholic who failed at everything he tried for. Have her hating her status in society and believing she deserved so much more than being a poor tailor's wife stuck with a needy kid)... and if she got into witchcraft it would have been a way to have an escape route from her husband and kid and a chance to have all those nice things she longed for....it would have made just as much sense as her being his mother who gave him trauma...

ALSO WE COULD HAVE GOTTEN HORNEY SCENES WITH CROWLEY

HORNEY SCENES WITH CROWLEY AND EVIL WITCH EX

WHY IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE MARK WAS SO REAL FOR THAT