"Unhealthy amount of ands"
My beta reader told me this. So I did a search. 88 of them in 3,500 words. If you don't mind, could you please look at one of your sets of 3.5k and see how many "ands" there are? I want to see how much of an outlier I am.
I hate choppy writing with a passion, so there's no way I'm going to reduce the length of sentences, but I can try other methods. I don't think it's a crazy amount though, so I want proof that it is.