Just & Up

My Lutheran preacher friend, Wayne, has made me alert for “just” prayers:  “Lord, I’m ‘just’ a humble man who’s ‘just’ trying to get by, so please ‘just’ hear me now, because I’m ‘just’ asking you for this one little thing.”

Usually there’s not quite that many ‘just’s’ used so close together, but I ‘just’ wanted to make the point that a nice little word used once is dandy, but used repeatedly is distracting and gets in the way of a writer’s or a preacher’s message.

Janet is a writing colleague who sent an interesting email this morning. She used a free software program on the internet to run a word count on her ‘just’ completed novel manuscript. The software revealed that she used the word ‘just’ 121 times. She unexpectedly learned that ‘just’ is overused by more people than 'just' fervent pastors appealing to the Lord.  

I was instantly curious and ran four chapters of manuscript from Redeeming Honor through the same software. ‘Up’ seems to be my ‘just.’ 

My characters apparently are forever walking ‘up’ the stairs, looking ‘up’ at each other, swinging ‘up’ into the saddle or climbing ‘up’ into a buggy. “Just go on up, he's waiting on you.” You get the idea.

I guess the point is that the word count software, which is free and instant in giving the results, is another great example of self-accessed technology making people better at what we do. Granted that the word count software isn’t telling me if my characters are likable, or if the plot is credible, or if I got my historical facts right, but it is letting writers like Janet and me probe for little distractions like too many ‘just’ or ‘up’ words.

Moving on, I woke ‘up’ this morning thinking about the chapter I’m going to write today. That’s fairly common for me, since early morning is when I do my best writing. I think. Coffee and keyboard when I’ve ‘just’ gotten ‘up’ ‘just’ seem a good pairing, as my sister would say. 

Nita is baby-sitting our grandson today, which is fine, except when she rolled out of bed, I thought, “Oh yeah, she’s taking care of John Junior this morning." The problem is our grandson is named Jackson and John Junior is the name of the baby character in Redeeming Honor. Oops.

I’m writing a Civil War novel, the emphasis on war. How a baby named John Junior came to be a player in the story is for another post, but the little guy’s presence has led me down some unexpected paths. Did mothers in Virginia use diapers in the 1860’s? When were baby bottles with rubber nipples invented? What if mother and child were separated, how would the infant eat? What toys were popular for babies in the 1860's?

Happily, I have an ongoing child development lab next door, where grandson Jackson is growing through his first year of life. I’d be surprised if Jackson’s actual birth last January and John Junior’s literary birth last February are coincidental. But, then again, I’m ‘just’ saying that romance, even in the 1860’s, leads to intimacy, and intimacy leads to pregnancies, and pregnancies lead to babies, and babies lead to the demands of childcare.

What I’m seeing day-by-day next door confirms that parenting and childcare aren’t for sissies, even with stacks of parenting books, plastic playthings, disposable diapers, and so on. Babies still poop every day, cry when they aren’t happy, eat every seven minutes, and never sleep. Maybe that’s an exaggeration.

 On the other hand, as son Todd says, watching Jackson is like watching a campfire. He’s not really doing anything, but we 'just' love to sit and stare at him endlessly.