Becoming too smug.

After loudly proclaiming the completion of my new novel, I was somewhat taken aback by a duplicate word search suggested by someone clearly a lot more professional than I.

   So you can imagine my shock, or perhaps not, when I discovered that I'd used the word: 'was' 6740 times in a piddling little 105k word novel..
 
   I know was is a good word, past participle of is and so forth, but even for my limited vocabulary that's an awful lot of repetition.

   So I've begun yet again. My MS is just a sea of yellow was's. But I've spent so much time and effort on this, that I'm not giving up. I refuse. Do you know how many synonyms there are for was? One and that's 'be'.  Fat lot of good that is.