Now that all twelve months of Holiday Heat are done, I’ve gone back and compiled all of my “six words” posts for the year. The entire series was about 628,000 words in length. Here are the words:

• THAT: 7762 to start, 6747 to finish, 1015 removed
• JUST: 2734 to start, 2284 to finish, 450 removed
• VERY: 1631 to start, 1544 to finish, 88 removed
• WHICH: 886 to start, 818 to finish, 68 removed
• REALLY: 1012 to start, 898 to finish, 114 removed
• ONLY: 909 to start, 863 to finish, 46 removed

In total, 13,154 instances of the six words made it into the books, for an occurence of one every 47 words. That seems more frequent than I originally thought. I also only cut out 1781 instances, which seems much smaller than I expected.

Ultimately my goal was to make it so that when you read the stories you didn’t find yourself distracted by overused words. I hope I accomplished that. You’ll just have to tell me if I did or not.