Oops! I Did It Again!

Last week, the proof for It’s Murder, My Son arrived and I immediately poured a glass of iced tea, put up my feet, and proceeded to read it from cover to cover.

A book reads differently when you’re not reading it on a laptop screen or a stack of papers with a red pen in hand. The words flow differently when you are holding it bound in a cover, sitting with your feet up, and a glass of cranberry iced tea at your elbow. When it comes to the proof, the author needs to put themselves in reader mode and try to pick up on what their readers will pick up.

When I did this with It’s Murder, My Son, I sucked in a deep breath that comes with the feeling of horror when I reached page 74. Holding my breath, I reread the section praying that I was not reading it the way the average reader would read it. It didn’t do any good. No matter how many times and ways I read it, it read the same.

Multi-millionaire playboy Mac Faraday has come across a witness for Niles Holt’s murder. He calls police officer David O’Callaghan to inform him that said witness had given a statement to the police at the time, but his statement, which contained pertinent information, seems to have gotten buried. Why?

On page 74, David O’Callaghan goes to the file room to retrieve the case file. On this page I state that he had read over the file so many times that he had it memorized. A few paragraphs later, for the first time, he is reading the witness’s statement.

The question hit me: If David had reviewed the case file so many times that he had it memorized, why didn’t he know anything about that witness statement? Why didn’t he know anything about the witness? The statement was right there in the file.

Ugh!

Luckily, this was the proof and it was an easy fix before going public. It’s Murder, My Son has been through two editors, which means two fresh pair of eyes have looked at it, but still no one noticed that David missed that witness statement after memorizing the case file.

That is why authors must go over every proof even if they feel like their eyes are going to bleed if they have to read “that thing” one more time.

I take comfort in knowing that it happens to the best of us.

Celia Hayes, author of To Truckee's Trail and The Adelsverein Trilogy, calls proofing “the ritual humiliation of authors”. She confesses, “There was an essential part of a word omitted in Chapter 4 of To Truckee's Trail which still aggravates the heck out of me. On pg 60, there is a description of wagon-train emigrants breaking camp, and mention of 'the privy-pits with the last shovel thrown upon their contents’ when it should have been ‘last shovel-full’. I am still embarrassed by it.”

Celia recalls the most potentially embarrassing typo; which she mercifully did catch in the ARC, and was able to correct in the released book; was in Adelsverein: The Gathering. In the dedication and thanks, she had misspelled the name of a person who had been enormously helpful and encouraging. If she had not caught this error, Celia says it would have been “embarrassment of the most heinous.”

Recalling one of his own bloopers, Dr. John Yeoman suggests, “We worry too much about published 'mistakes' that the reader will probably never spot but we never see those errors, too late to amend, that they joy in disclosing to us.”

Yeoman recalls, “My PhD thesis in creative writing referred throughout to one 'K J Rowling' as the author of the Harry Potter novels. This mistake appeared in several places, although I had proofread the thesis umpteen times. My examiners awarded me a doctorate magna cum laude, but neither referred to my howler. This rather suggested they had not read my thesis. The error only came to light when my wife flipped through the bound volume, about to be lodged in the campus library, and whooped with delight. No, I did not correct it."

Maybe it is because of those who do delight in pointing out our mistakes after a book’s release, even in a jovial manner, that authors feel particularly sensitive to any literary misstep. It’s been ingrained in our psyche as writers that our work must be perfect. Literary agents and publishers only accept work that is error free. One mistake and you’re out, especially if that mistake goes live in a published book.

Authors can assume that those who make it to the best seller lists don’t make any mistakes like having a detective find a report tucked into a case file that he has long memorized, or not knowing the name of a famous author. After all, isn’t it their perfection that separates them from the rest of us?

Not necessarily.

Mistakes happen, even to the best of us. So many in fact that one website is dedicated to listing them for our enjoyment…and emotional support:

According to website the Best Book Mistakes, the master of suspense, Stephen King had trouble deciding which of Eddie’s arms was broken in his book IT. It went back and forth between the left and the right.

In the start of Part 6, in King’s The Green Mile, the men let Percy out of the closet. They take the tape off his mouth and he starts to rub his lips, then lowers his hand to speak. The problem is that he's in a straight-jacket at this point.

In Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, when Edward is telling Carlisle's history to Bella, he says that around 1660-1670 Carlisle found a coven of true vampires that lived hidden in the sewers of the city. According to Best Book Mistakes, the vampires couldn't have been hidden inside the sewers because there weren't any. The sewage system was only built around 1859.

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, while being sorted into houses, Harry looks up at the Sorting Stool, and there are only three people left to be sorted. Professor McGonagall then calls out the names of four more kids.

So, boys and girls, the moral to this blog post is that we can take comfort in our imperfections. This is not to say that we can let down our guard and write with wreckless abandonment and a total disregard for facts, grammar, and continuity. But, if we do make a mistake, even if it goes public, we can shake our head, say, “Oops! I did it again,” and keep on writing.

Kill Me Please

Most writers, like me, are die-hard introverts. We are most content when we are home alone with our imagination, laptop, and dog or cat or goldfish or whatever it is that keeps us company without making too many demands.

I don’t get cabin fever. This past February, I cursed when the snow plow came through three days after the blizzard. It was so unfair. My friend Jill who lives in the “flatlands” as I call the valley below our mountain got to stay snowed in for two more days. She does get cabin fever.

Yet, there is a danger to giving into your solitary ways when you are a writer. Inspiration comes from being “out there”. How else can you come up with interesting characters or story lines? You can’t count on anyone worthy of being put in your next masterpiece crossing your path while sitting in your recliner in your bathrobe and slippers. Agatha Christie based Hercule Poirot on a gentleman she saw at a café. Sherlock Holmes was based on one of Sir Conan Doyle’s college professors.

Don’t assume that being called a character is an insult. I am often asked to be put in my books. It seems to be a toss-up between wanting to be the innocent accused, or the suspect that the reader hopes did it so they will go to jail, or the actual killer.

Only once, a young man asked after one of my speaking engagements if he could be a murder victim. Never before, and never since, has anyone requested to be the victim--unless you want to count the request to be killed off coming from one’s behavior.

Have you ever seen someone incredibly ill dressed and thought, “Do they ever look in the mirror?” Well, sometimes I will meet someone and wonder, “Do they have any idea of how their behavior looks to others?”

Through my years of people watching, I have met some people who seem to beg, “Kill me! Please!” They aren’t asking the neighborhood psychopath to take an ax to them, but they do seem to be begging the local mystery writer to make them the subject of a fictional murder investigation.

Recently, in my quest for inspiration, I got out of bed, kicked off my fluffy slippers, brushed my teeth, put on my bra, and went off to census training for the United States government. (If I can get paid for people watching, so much the better.) Here I was in a large room with twenty-five other adults all awaiting the opportunity to learn how to go door to door to count people…and to meet characters.

My training class was a virtual garden of characters ripe for the picking. There was the mom wanting to earn enough money to take her children to Disney World; the wife hoping to make enough money to pay her husband’s medical bills, the dog trainer who was short on funds, and the elderly couple wanting to make enough money to drive across country in their RV this summer.

Let’s not forget the mystery writer in search of inspiration.

Add to this mix an executive recently retired from a position that had two hundred employees working under her. I know this because she broadcast it several times over the course of the week. She was also the recipient of numerous awards for excellence. She said that it was important that everyone, including the instructor, know this information. Why? Her awards were real evidence of how truly far beneath her we all were.

By the end of the first day, it became clear that I had found a potential murder victim.

An hour into the training, The Executive balked at the one hour allotted for lunch during the eight-hour day. “I find that unacceptable. It violates my employment agreement.” The Executive wanted the thirty minute lunch that she had agreed to and to leave a half hour earlier, even if it was inconvenient for the other twenty-five people in the room. Since none of us ever had two hundred men working under us, our lunch plans didn’t matter.

By the end of the week, I had a room filled with readers waiting in line to buy the book I write in which the murder victim is The Award Winning Executive.

It was during The Great Lunch Negotiations that the mother trying to get to Disney World turned to me. “There’s a reason I’m a stay-at-home mom.” Like the Disney Mom, I work at home alone for a reason. Maybe it’s because my mother drilled manners into my psyche that I have never mixed well with corporate America. I actually care about the other people in the room.

I don’t actually lift a whole character and put them into a book. Rather, I will pick up looks, styles, or traits to use. I will also store away situations that I have encountered to use in a plotline.

For example, the one home I visited for the census in which the wife screamed at me about how she refused to take part. Okay, I said. But when I turned to leave she called me back. Maybe her husband will answer my questions. After bellowing for her husband, she resumed yelling at me. It seemed to take an eternity for her husband to come to the door while she continued screaming about how she was not going to participate in the census. When I once again offered to leave, she told me to wait because her husband was coming. After he arrived, she went to get a beer while he answered my questions between comments about how nosy the government is.

It was during this interview that I put together a plotline in which a couple is murdered by a door-to-door sales rep pushed over the edge by…

After all my years of people watching, I have yet to answer this question: When characters like these end up between the covers of a book, do they actually see themselves the way the writer saw them?