‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘But there’s absolutely no way you are submitting a science fiction piece with the word ‘luna’ used spelt like that. It’s not spelt correctly if it’s referring to anything to do with the moon. That would be l-u-n-a-r.’
I took in a large breath of air, about to argue my case. I can be forthright too y’know.
‘Unless, of course, it’s for proper nouns. You can call something whatever-the-hell-you-want in that case,’ she intervened before I could respond. ‘If you want to write about Luna the Roman goddess of the moon, you go right ahead.’
‘But, it’s also got to incorporate landscape, so it’s got to have something to do with the moon. A goddess can’t have a landscape can she?’ I argued, feebly. I knew I was going to lose, but I had to make some effort at maintaining artistic control over my piece.
‘Come on. I’m a writer, an alchemist of words. I can make them do anything I want, and that including misspelling a word. That’s the joy of being a creative writer, don’t you see?’
‘Not on my watch you don’t.’
I was getting desperate now. I’d written the bloody thing. Was I going to have to write another piece, just because some stupid name inventor at Dulux or Crown or whoever, had left the flipping ‘r’ out? I know it’s only a short story, but still it’s taking up time I should be spending on my Creative Visions piece that still doesn’t want to be finished.
I made one last attempt although I knew my argument was feeble. ‘It says in Wikipedia that the Soviet lunar space-probe was called ‘Luna’ so they must have been happy with the spelling.’
‘Wikipedia? Really? Anyway that’s a proper noun. I told you proper nouns are okay. And the Russian’s use the cyrillic alphabet so we don’t know how they actually spell, do we? It’s no good arguing. My word is final, I’m afraid.’
I know when I’m beaten. It’s back to the metaphorical drawing board for me.
‘Luna, the luminous goddess of the moon gazed as far as her eye could see over the landscape...’
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