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Show Notes:\nIn case you're wondering about my submission journey at the moment, it's at the juncture of Maybe and Not Going to Happen. My agent is working hard to sell the title and I have total faith in her. However, I'm losing faith in me and, most of all, publishing as a whole.\nI did a TikTok video last week where I lamented the process a bit. I'm afraid I rambled. Not surprising, I know, so I don't know if I made my point beyond I'm frustrated. I read Publisher's Weekly every week and see these huge deals and then I think about the writers I know with great books that didn't sell. I know a handful of writers whose first books didn't sell and this isn't something that's uncommon in the traditional publishing world. When we're trying to land an agent that step is built up as the end all, be all. If we can just get an agent then we'll be okay.\nSorry to break it to you, that isn't always the case. Sometimes, (more often than I realized) not even your agent's passion for your book can get it sold to a publisher. This means that the book we worked so hard on for months and months (most often years) languishes, because after they take the book out and it's declined (or ignored) by everyone, that's it for that book baby. You have to put it to bed ala Sleeping Beauty and hope that one day a heroic knight (i.e. editor/publisher) will come along and wake it from its slumber.\nWe're nowhere near that point now with Catching Fireflies, but it hasn't stopped me from panicking about getting to that point.\nWord of warning to those of you who've chosen a traditional publishing path: Get ready to have your emotions seriously played with.\nI still have hope for my book baby, but I will say that the closer we get to August and then the end of the year, the closer I will be to having a complete and total failed-writer breakdown. The good news, though, is that I have the first draft of my second novel almost completed. I think that's good news anyway.\nIf you're experiencing similar oh-woe-is-me moments in your writing life, send me a message or an email and we can commiserate. I'm pretty good at that.\nNow, let's talk about adverbs. First and foremost, what is an adverb? According Callum Sharp at The Writing Cooperative, an adverb is "A word or phrase that modifies the meaning of an adjective, verb, or other adverb, expressing manner, place, time, or degree." Most often those adverbs end in "L-Y" (i.e. sudden-ly, angri-ly, happi-ly, bitter-ly, awkward-ly, etc.), and most often those adverbs can be found in dialogue tags, otherwise referred to end tags.\nFrom \nAllow me to remind you of Elmore Leonard's rule #4: Never use an adverb to modify said.\nI'm a firm believer that writing rules aren't really rules at all. They're guidelines. Some are too rigid, too restrictive. While others seem like something tossed out into the writingverse to see how many people would be crazy enough to follow it.\nElmore Leonard has ten writing rules. Most of them are good. Several of them should be modified. These are rules that worked for him while writing. They, in his opinion, made his writing stronger, and if they made his writing stronger they'll certainly make our writing stronger, right? Maybe.\nI like rule number 4. It makes sense because if you're using an adverb to modify said, you probably haven't done your job with the action in the scene. It comes across as lazy or amateurish to use adverbs to let your readers know how a character is saying something.\nOn Twitter last week a writer posted that they had no idea exclamation points are so abhorred in writing. They used over 100 in what they were working on and they were thinking that was a bit much. I agree. As I read through the replies, though, I found one that exemplifies exactly why the rule exists:\n"I use exclamation marks to demonstrate tone in my character's dialogue."\nThis, my friends, is bad, bad, bad. It shows that you aren't using the actions in the scene to your advantage, that you're count