Do you know the feeling when you suddenly realise you have made a horrible mistake? And does this sometimes hit you in the middle of the night? Well, that happened to me during the early hours of this morning.
I am working through the second draft of my novel, The Reluctant Scribe, set in 7th century China and the Tang Dynasty. There is a scene where I write “eight of us stood in our line on the marble step”, and another line goes “I followed the Dean who led me across the marble“, and another -“I shuffled from foot to foot, sliding my toes across the marble tiles”. I am sure there are other mentions of marble if I continue looking…
But here is the problem:
The Tang used mud brick and wood in their buildings.
They did not use stone or marble.
Arrrrhhhh.
And here is the solution:
I am going to have to run a word search for every reference to ‘marble’ in my novel, and find a more appropriate replacement.
Thank goodness for technology.
That is, I am sure, only one mistake among many.
I spent most of yesterday writing and re-writing the same scene. It is an important scene and one I wanted to get right. This morning, I went back to the same darn scene and started reworking it again. After a while, I realised I was never going to make my word count target today if I didn’t stop fiddling.
Ruth Livingstone 