Meteor Monday - astrologically speaking

Cool play on words, eh? Actually that was a typo, but since I tend to kind of go with the flow, here's my horoscope for today from horoscope.com

Things seem to be going quite well for you in many respects, Aquarius. Your thinking is clear, your emotions are under control, and the puzzle pieces are fitting into place. This is your time to take advantage of these pockets of good fortune and turn them into something huge. You have the power to make anything happen - especially now.

Hmm.... sounds pretty darn good. Too bad I'm not actually to the point of querying today - maybe I'll stick this one in my pocket and pretend that's what my horoscope said on the day that I do sound out those query letters. Speaking of which, I re-wrote my query last week - it's slightly different and I hope that I got out all of those cliche phrases, but there's still one sentence that doesn't seem to flow right so I'm going to wait a while before posting it. Tomorrow however, be on the lookout. I've decided to post Chapter 1 of Nikki's Wish (again) and do a call out for Beta readers.

Til then, here's the run-down of what I accomplished this week:
1. Did a fair bit of revising different scenes. Took out one whole section and a bit of another which managed to let me cut about 2K words. I got most of the changes with Nikki's mother done, and I changed up a few things in the beginning 3 chapters that I thought made Nikki look too young.
2. Did some tightening by searching for overused words: my focus was on had, just and adverbs. Funny thing about the adverbs is that there were few pages where I had more than 2 per page and those that I did have  tended to be in sections of dialogue. Since people do throw in more adverbs while they're talking, I didn't fuss too much over those. The ones that I did fuss over were the ones that I had in description sections. The two adverbs I came across most often: actually, probably and only (which sometimes isn't an adverb). A lot of these I just tossed out the window.
3. I finished one book - yeah, I know not my typical pace, but this was a rather thick book - Dreaming of Amelia by Jaclyn Moriarty. I really enjoyed it and I'll be doing a review soon.
4. Read way too many blogs. :)

My manuscript is starting to tire me out at this point. I've done too many revisions over the past few weeks and every sentence I read sounds blahhhhh!! Or it could just be that I just have Jaclyn Moriarty envy - man does that girl know how to turn a phrase. At any rate, I'm only going to allow myself to do revisions for one more week and then I'm going to take a break while I put it into some more beta reader's hands (and yes, my sisters).

Now for contests: yeah, I've become addicted to these.
1. From choco at in which a girl reads - choco does really cool reviews and I encourage you to join her site even if you don't intend to enter the contest.
2. a newbie blogger, sparkling reviews that I just came across is doing another cool contest.

Cheers guys!