Sent!!

 My book has once again been sent to the proofreaders.
Almost every single page has editing.

I have notes and notes of alternative words for:
grin. laugh. wink. smirk. whispered. snorted. laughed. gasped.
glare. gaze. stared. shrugged. heart pounded. froze.
idiot. sweet. embraced. 

I have counted (well, Word did the counting) and replaced so many of the above words and tried to keep 
the usage to under 20. (A number I just arbitrarily chose based on when certain phrases got annoying).

The words that far exceed that amount are:
sorry. heart. head. cry. hug. hands.
especially heart or head pounded and shook their head

I crossed out or replaced a lot of those when I could.

Often I'd replace with another word and then discover I'd used that word in the sentences previous or after.
So had to rethink again.

Chapters with 

glass. cutting. blood. piece. shard

got suuuuper whittled down because I decided I didn't want to use 

those words more than once in a scene. And it took hours.

Also challenging: finding different words for sea glass, piece, poured and sea glass colors.

Guys, it's not as easy as it sounds.

Even after all my previous editing and revising and beta readers and developmental editing and proofreadings, I still found some timeline problems and times when I said one person was somewhere and then a few paragraphs later said they were somewhere else.

I used Blake as the name of Henry's friend AND Matt's friend.

And Lily as the lady in the pool AND a girl in Henry's class.

I'm still finding mistakes with the "ing" grammar rule, but I'm recognizing it more and 

it's finally sounding wrong when I do it wrong. Like, I get it now.

I clarified time progression quite a bit better in the last ten-ish chapters.

And hopefully integrated the storyline better in the chapters 5-9.

I think I got the ending wording right.

I've got tabs on page 1 to continue reworking the paragraph where they drive to the lake

(I say summer twice and can't figure out how to get around it)

and on page 309 still revisiting what words Grandpa and Jill use to console

Jake at the end of their family meeting and answer all the questions.

I'll bet you anything there are still improvements to be made.

Read three times in its entirety over the last three weeks. 

And many chapters over and over and over.

But my goal was to finish by today, and I did it.