Be wherry of words

I just heard on the television a director talking about a film festival based about the east end of London. He said that people of the past ‘left a residue’, which to be honest made me feel a bit queasy. I pictured a thin film of people left smeared onto brickwork and windows. I don’t think that is quite the image he was hoping to achieve.

This leads me to a mistake I made very early on with writing. I put on the page that ‘the rain was running in rivets down the window screen’ – you can just hear the smashing of glass, can’t you? Of course I meant rivulets…

But it is enormously easy to reach for the wrong word when you are writing (unless you are a Writing Guru. Such people do exist, so I hear). Homonyms are the most obvious ones…

Eye have always liked poet tree
Eye think eye wood be rather good
If only eye didn’t believe my spell-chequer
Witch says lies are better than Ruth
I have severed books and like to reed
When the whether outside is coaled
One day I will right and rime my own
Poems when I am feeling bowled

Today I have gone backwards to pick at chapter eighteen. I feel a bit better about it now, so tomorrow will be facing chapter nineteen again. I just need to somehow propel myself over this hurdle and then I think I will be fine. What I need, in fact, is a medieval rock-slinging contraption. I could sit in it and it could throw me into chapter twenty. Although if you’re all out of rock-slinging contraptions, I notice Madeira cake works pretty well instead.

I think one of the first things I will do when I finish this novel is join a gym.