10 Biggest Writing Mistakes - by Kristen Weber - and my worst ones are here:

Spending too much time on punctuation or grammar when you really need to make sure your story is perfect first. Copyediting - or any smaller editing in that vein - is a waste of time until you are 100% sure the story is bulletproof. Otherwise, you’re just painting a house that is going to fall down.

Too much backstory. Ask yourself, what is the first spark that ignites the main plot? Where is it? Can you weave any of the set up you’re giving us around that instead and move the first spark up? You need to grab readers quickly. You can introduce them to your world and your characters around action that moves us forward, instead of spending time so much time setting up your world and then starting the plot.

100 Common-Sense Ways to Write Better by Melissa Donovan

Number 11 hit home for today, having finished offa copy of The New York Review of Books while doing my laundry:

Stop talking about what you’re going to write. Stop thinking about what you’re going to write. Sit down and write.

I have taken time off from my fiction, meaning to do some reading and thinking rather than writing. "Chasing Ashes" is being put off still, but tonight I will work on some stories. Maybe I will submit something again; that has been put off all this month. 

This also hit home:

Don’t stop for anything. Some days you’ll be too tired, too hungry, too stressed out to write. Give yourself some slack (cut your writing session in half) but don’t skip it!

And this, too:

Rewrite to make the substance of your work deeper, clearer, and more concise. I recently read an essay by a writer who rewrote an entire book twelve times. Twelve times! That’s dedication.

Just go read the whole list. It is one I wish I had seen when I was 24. 

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