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Post by Keira on Aug 14, 2007 20:30:20 GMT -5
"she gave birth to conjoined twins, the boy died first then the girl". Boy/girl conjoined twins!!! It was meant to be a meaningful moment, but I couldn't take it seriously after that. |
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Post by theonceler on Aug 14, 2007 20:54:26 GMT -5
Greg Kinnear, I think.
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Post by zickachik73 on Aug 15, 2007 9:44:44 GMT -5
Haha, regarding the Christina Skye book - and this is weird because I just picked up "Code Word: Bikini" at the grocery store (OF ALL PLACES!) last night, not realizing that it was the same author discussed here. Anyhow, I checked out her website when I bought the book and one of her FAQ's had to do with an overterm pregnancy so I had to come back here. She says she wrote "several months" and at some point in editing it was changed to "seven months." check it out. www.christinaskye.comwell, that was long and (relatively) pointless. haha. |
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Post by Nittanylizard on Aug 15, 2007 14:31:38 GMT -5
She says she wrote "several months" and at some point in editing it was changed to "seven months." Oh my gosh, that sucks. That happened to me once with a poem I wrote - somebody with apparently a limited vocabulary changed one word because they thought I'd written it wrong, and it made the end of the poem completely senseless. It was just the high school newspaper and nobody probably even read it, lol, but still... As far as misspellings in books, I don't think it's too uncommon for things like that to be missed. People tend think of an editor as just the person who picks through looking for grammar and spelling, but when you're getting a book published, your editor is the person who checks for bigger things, like flow, characterization, plotholes, etc. There are editors who check for spelling and grammar as well at some point, but again, with as many novels as they edit every year, I don't think it's uncommon for a few misspellings to get overlooked. There was a series of books that I read a while back where in, I think it was book 5, the woman who was pregnant at the end was going to have a girl, and in the 6th book, it had turned into a boy (might have been the other way around). I could be wrong, but I swear that's the way it panned out. I never went back to double check. It was the Alvin Maker series, by Orson Scott Card. |
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Post by fairlane on Aug 15, 2007 16:24:34 GMT -5
It can drive me insane seeing stuff like that. Like the twin thing, how can the author write it without realising that it doesn't make sense? I don't even remember anything else about the book except that one thing.
Another book I read recently had a character with Down Syndrome which they kept incorrectly refering to as Downs Syndrome. It's really minor, but still if they are going to write about the condition, they should have known that.
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Post by maxiekat on Aug 15, 2007 18:02:17 GMT -5
She says she wrote "several months" and at some point in editing it was changed to "seven months.". Wow, that does suck. I know the book went through several editors because I spoke about it to an author who is friends with her (I didn't know they were friends until the author told me). I frequent a lot of boards where romance authors post and I know they get upset when people gang up on them for errors because a lot of times those errors are created during a stage of the publishing process that they weren't a part of. |
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Post by zevie on Aug 15, 2007 22:12:42 GMT -5
That thing about "seven"/"several" WOULD really suck. But, speaking of errors, I just watched an episode of Friends where some girl claimed that she lived only a two-hour ferry ride away from Montreal - in Nova Scotia. I may be totally crazy, but wouldn't this involve some sort of bending or warping of time and space? Is there some other Montreal that I don't know about?
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Post by zickachik73 on Aug 16, 2007 7:40:52 GMT -5
maybe it was like the Concord of the ferry world, breaking the sound barrier and the like?
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Post by hahukumkonn on Sept 2, 2007 18:11:51 GMT -5
There was a fic that just drove me effing bonkers because the author admitted to being too lazy to do her fact checking and had Dallas - in 1970! - checking a text message on a dropped cell phone. Regarding detail. I actually looked (using Mapquest) at cities in North Dakota to get an idea of what streets might exist in the sixties - so I looked at the larger-but-not-too-large cities where the outlying areas would have been even remoter at that time. I've probably seen and ignored several minor errors in fics; it's the major ones like anachronisms that ruin them for me.  |
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Post by fairlane on Sept 2, 2007 18:54:39 GMT -5
I'm the same - I have to remind myself that the guys can't all get hold off each other all the time like we can these days. I do wonder if everyone convieniently bumps into each other while out and about a little too often in my fics lol.
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Post by zevie on Sept 2, 2007 19:29:24 GMT -5
You know, I live in a much bigger city than Tulsa was at the time of the novel, and I still manage to bump into people I know. I figure it's because the city is very neighbourhood based, with a couple of big commercial streets and areas that everyone goes to. I imagine Tulsa might be similar for some reason (correct me if I'm wrong!) - lots of smaller neighbourhoods connected into a city, with the Ribbon (that's Tulsa, right?) being the big commercial street. Plus, teenagers are creatures of habit, lol, or at least that's what I remember. There are hangouts where you ALWAYS are, mostly because you know that's where your friends would be. At least, this is what I remember from the pre-cellphone period of my childhood, lol.
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Post by fairlane on Sept 2, 2007 19:37:06 GMT -5
I have no idea of the actual size of Tulsa, maybe thats why I have problems there lol. I also imagine the events taking place in a neighbourhood setting rather than city wide. That is definitly the impression from the book - they walk most places, live nearby each other, the big rumble in the end involves about 40 kids on both sides.
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Post by Nittanylizard on Sept 2, 2007 19:44:15 GMT -5
zevie - I was thinking the same thing - not unusual to bump into your friends if there are only a few certain places you go, and especially when there's no central air or Playstation to keep you home  . Going back to the original post, I saw this quote the other day and immediately thought of this thread (I might put it on my profile page): "Most writers of fiction are autodidacts, to some degree or another. We learn to teach ourselves what we need. We get in there fast and shallow and we suck the life and the juice from the subject in our own way. Then we manage to give the impression that we know everything about the subject in our writing." --Neil Gaiman |
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Post by theonceler on Sept 2, 2007 20:47:53 GMT -5
Tulsa now is nearly 500,000 people I think. But you really can't tell when you leave Tulsa and enter Jenks, or the other neighboring suburbs. Back then, though, I've been told that places like Broken Arrow, Jenks, Bixby, etc. were "the middle of nowhere". The city is pretty neighborhood-y. One of the biggest streets is Cherry Street, where a lot of good shopping and restaurants are. I assume it existed back in the 60s, but I don't know for sure.
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