A couple of good friends are helping me proofread my romance, The Cowboy and the Executive, before I send it to Rachel Carrera for her special magic. Honestly, I thought I’d crossed most of my t’s and dotted all of my i’s, but I should have known better.
Most of the corrections involve missing quotation marks or spaces where no spaces should be, but one of my mistakes, called to my attention by my friend, Flo, made me laugh out loud.
Apparently, on a couple of occasions I’d written that my heroine’s bedroom was on the second floor. Unfortunately, in the previous chapter I’d already described the home she was staying in as a sprawling one-story ranch house.
I suppose if the home was, say inside Hogwarts or located on Diagon Alley, my mistake might be a charmingly magical occurrence, but since it’s just a Muggle dwelling on a ranch outside of Amarillo, Texas, I had to make a correction or two.
Thanks to Flo for keeping my protagonist’s feet on the ground. Still, I wonder if there’s a place for the Golden Snitch in this book?
Peace, people!
Praying for Eyebrowz 
🙂
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Oh never worry. I had one heroine wearing a certain colored dress in the first half of the chapter that had miraculously changed colour by the second half. Obvi she dyed it offstage, or was that offpage… And you know the book was out there?
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Lol!
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If it makes you feel any better, the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would write his Sherlock Adventures on a train into London and often would not have time to go back and check previous chapters, especially since The Strand magazine published a chapter each month. Therefore, he made countless mistakes and even forgot the name of his housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, from time to time. It’s something all authors do. The fun is years later readers love to debate why Conan Doyle changed the names of people, places, and things assuming it was part of the mystery. He once confessed that he simply forgot while trying to meet his deadline!
I have personally, on occasion, accidentally changed the names of minor characters mid stream . Oops.
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😊That does make me feel better!
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When i got the rights back and I was putting it out myself I spotted it…
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Just a few minutes ago I was reading the romance ONE MORE TIME and realized I had a minor character who’d moved to Tulsa AND To Austin. Sheesh. At least I found it before it went any further.
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The awful thing? And I ain’t trying to sound like a moan…. It does not seem to matter how many times you do it. it is like he goblins creep in at night and they do things.. .. It is awful
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I can sense that’s true!
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Alas… I even spot errors in printed books that have been around not quite since the dawn of ancient civilisations but long enough, that clearly escaped notice in their day and are still there in like in recently reprinted editions…. Authors like Du Maurier for any’s sake.
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Before I published Mayhem I didn’t really notice errors in other books. Now, I see them everywhere.
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Yep. But it is so easily done. I mind when I edited this hist mag, we had this proofer who NOTHING got past and this local columnist who NEVER made an error. So one Friday I am sitting twiddling my thumbs, job done, when i happens to glance again and I sees that instead of window display in part of the column, as in the special annual window display, the word window is missing an n and it says widow display. I never moved my ass so fast in life to get that back from the printers.
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Widow. Window. Ha!
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I had this vision of these old dearies parading about in their pants. The two folks who should have spotted it were utterly mortified….
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I’m sure!
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An observant proof-reader is truly worth his/her weight in gold!
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Absolutely!
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Hey, maybe she sleeps in the attic!
Writers are notoriously their own worst editors. When I published my book, I was dismayed to learn I had changed the history of baseball by calling Boston’s team the Rex Sox. Maybe I had dinosaurs on my mind?
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Lol! I kind of dig Rex Sox. Of course, those short arms aren’t ideal for a baseball player’s necessary skill set.
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Ha! They’d better hope they don’t have to field many grounders.
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Could be problematic…
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Tell me about your book.
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Thank you for asking! I self-published the novel in 2011, which means it will be 10 years old this fall. Holy cow.
It’s a thriller about a journalist who writes an expose about an eco-terrorist group so brazen they commit murder in order to further their agenda. She ends up an unwitting player in a game of cat and mouse with the leader of the group.
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Oooh! Sounds good. Is it still on Amazon?
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It is indeed! I guess the name would help, too. “No Time for Kings.” 🙂
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Thanks.
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I just purchased it.
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Ahh, those little details. 🙂 This reminds me of the song “If I Were a Rich Man” in Fiddler on the Roof. The line goes something like – I’d have one long staircase just going up, another even longer coming down. And one staircase going nowhere just for show.” That line always made me laugh.
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One of my favorites.
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Reblogged this on Disablities & Mental Health Issues.
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