diary of a dialup dinosaur

She was a fantastic writer. I was her beta reader for years and I used to make fun of her because in her effort to avoid the repetition of "[character] says" dialogue tags she'd invariably end up with things like "rasped" or "wheezed" or something else that had me pointing out that just because she was asthmatic didn't mean that all of her characters had to have respiratory issues as well. In return, she'd do word counts on my sentences and flag the ones over 100.