“The Road to Hell…

feels just like this...
…is paved with good intentions.”
We are told to learn the mantra ‘I am a writer’ to establish our resolve and determination.Well, yesterday I learned a new one…
I am in the early stages of revising… lovely word that, isn’t it?
What it really means is, you painstakingly hunt down and ferret out all the errors you were unaware of in the initial writing.
Normally I love to edit. Admittedly, up until recently, I have been editing other people’s work, but optimistic about editing my own work. Should be a piece of cake, I thought.
We are constantly reminded of the words your writing should never contain, not if you wish to appear intelligent and I was busy checking when the realisation hit me. I hadn’t written a single sentence without including at least one ‘was’ and sometimes more than once!
What could be wrong with me? I knew better than that, or at least I thought I did.
Just to be sure, I ended up checking all my previous edits. They were fine, so this must be a recent development. Another wrinkle my old brain had acquired? Could it be regressing, finally turning into a bowl of porridge?
Added to all this annoyance, the discovery that there is no easy replacement for this word. Some words can be substituted quite easily, but not this one.
Could it be possible my writing and editing days were almost over? It certainly felt that way.
(I found seven ‘was’ in this piece…now only three)
What faux pas do you make? (and what do you do about them?)