Author Oops!

Hurricane Dorian Update

Wednesday, September 4, 11:30 p.m.
By some miracle, Florida escaped the brunt of Hurricane Dorian, which passed by 100 miles out to sea with wind, storm surge, and some power outages along the coast, and little more than occasional squalls inland (where I live). We look at the pictures coming out of the Bahamas (pounded by 200 mph winds for c. 36 hours) and know that could have been Florida, except for a "High" our local forecaster named "The Cavalry," which traveled more than 1500 miles across the U.S. & turned Dorian north, where it is still skirting the coast, causing trouble in Georgia and the Carolinas.

We sigh with relief, and thank God for being spared. If you are able to contribute to Bahamas relief, please do.

Clearly, someone in our local grocery chain (Publix) has a sense of humor.

The photo above was posted to Facebook on Thursday, August 28, when Dorian was a Cat 1 and we could still joke about it. [For those who don't live in hurricane country - that's a map of Florida featuring the infamous "cone of uncertainty" in white) with Dorian (in red) bearing down on Central Florida.]

Grace note:  And amidst all the preparations for Dorian, I discovered I have a broken foot! Am hobbling around with a "boot" and a walker. (More on that next week.) 

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AUTHOR OOPS!

Since January 2011, I have been offering advice on Writing and Editing, primarily emphasizing, "take the time to get it right; research; edit, edit, edit; keep lists of characters and descriptions, etc., etc. And I really try to follow my own advice!

But . . .

Only days after the publication of The Abominable Major, a Regency author friend pointed out a mistake. A mistake I never would have made if I'd taken the time to re-read the companion book, The Lady Takes a Risk, before writing The Abominable Major. Except one book was set on a hops farm in Kent, the other in London, and never the twain should meet. Yes, there were bit-parts by cross-over characters, but nothing that even hinted: "Re-read Risk first!" So I gleaned the names I needed from the Risk Character List, and that was it.

Alas, it had been two years since Risk and my list did not extend to details about one minor character—Viscount Pomfret, Colonel Marcus Trevor's older brother, who makes a brief appearance near the end of The Abominable Major. I needed him to have a wife to act as hostess for a dinner party that was a pivotal part of the plot. So that is how I wrote the scene. And that is how the scene was published. Except . . .

In The Lady Takes a Risk, Lord Pomfret states unequivocally that he will never marry. Oops! At first, I thought I could fix the problem by simply removing that passage, but when I read it over, it was apparent that scene was too involved, too significant to remove it. Okay, so I'd mention the fact that the viscount met a young lady who caused him to change his mind. Except . . . the story of the major and the countess directly follows the story of Colonel Trevor and Lady Amelie. There simply wasn't time for Viscount Pomfret to have met and married someone in anything more than a shabby travesty of a marriage. And he simply wasn't the sort!

So what to do?

I printed off the dinner party scene and the club scene that precedes it. I scowled and grumbled and grimaced—and ended up making changes to four pages. I can only hope I caught all the anomalies! Basically, I changed the hostess of the dinner party from Lord Pomfret's wife to his mother, another character we met briefly in Risk. This, I hope, satisfied the facts in the first book while sticking to the rules of Regency entertaining in the second.

And, as I've blogged before, I was able to make changes only because The Abominable Major was an e-book. I polished the revised pages, typed in the revisions to both the Amazon and Smashwords versions, checking each two or three times over. I then made sure they were still in My Documents where they were supposed to be (I've had mss revert to Word Perfect!). And then I simply uploaded the new version to each vendor. 

Did I have egg on my face? I surely did. And still do. It's really embarrassing to know I've been urging people to read the two books as a set and realizing that anyone who did that was going to have my blatant Oops slap them in the face.

So apologies to all. And use this tale as a Warning. It is so very easy to goof up. Keep good records, and if there's been a lapse of time between books in a series, never fail to read the last one you wrote before beginning the next!

Grace note:  as I worked on this blog, I realized I never had a confirmation of the change from KDP. And after downloading a copy, sure enough, the first revision didn't take; perhaps I failed to continue to the very end and hit "Publish." Sigh. So I've just repeated the process. Hopefully, the corrected version will soon be available.  So - a second lesson. Check and re-check everything.Tedious, I know, but none of us is infallible.

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For a link to Blair's website, click here.

 

For a link to The Abominable Major on Amazon,  click here.

For a link to The Abominable Major on Smashwords,  click here.  

Background information on The Abominable Major can be found on my Facebook Author Page. To read it, click here.

Thanks for stopping by,

Grace