My swamp, my rules

I'm reading through my advisor's notes on the manuscript. At one point he circles the word 'swampy' and says 'You use this word a lot - starting to get noticeable.' So I ran 'swampy' through the Edit > Find tool in Word, and it's true - I use 'swampy' eight times in the manuscript. Eight things in the story are swampy. I had no idea the word had such a powerful hold on my imagination, but it does.

(I usually use it in connection with vomit. Just a bit of trivia for you there).

Frequent offenders

These are words, or collections of words, that I over-use when writing:

Quite
A bit
Not really
A little
A couple
A few
A while

Notice that they are all pretty vapid, colourless things ... qualifiers. They're unnecessary and weaken writing.
"I am a bit cold."
"I am cold."
So much stronger just to cut them out. I'm doing a search-and-destroy to expunge them from the book. I think I use them in my writing (unconsciously) because I use them a lot in my speech. I've got a very British accent (like a newsreader), and I use typical British understatement a lot. "Not bad" when something is good. "I'm a bit down" when I'm depressed. It annoys me sometimes, and I'm trying to be aware of it and say what I mean, but it's hard. Luckily there is an Edit - Find - Replace command in Word. Would be nice if there was one in my head.

Total word count: 49,000 (I didn't quite make it to 50,000 over the weekend)
Today's word count: 1,000 so far
Cups of coffee: four
What's playing: Moby