Fessing up

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

A quote from the "Frog and Peach" comedy sketch by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore:

Dudley Moore: Do you feel you've learnt by your mistakes here?

Peter Cook: I think I have, yes, and I think I can probably repeat them almost perfectly.

If I could go back in time and give a bit of advice to my fledgling writer self, one thing I'd say: start a series bible--which is, essentially, all the bits of information you create about character and locale, things you are positive you can't possibly forget. Except a couple of books down the line--or, in my case, 24 books down the line--you will.

A case in point.

In Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon, the fourth book of the series, Meg, speaking of her brother, Rob, says:

Rob had brains enough to graduate from the University of Virginia Law School.  Not at the top of his class, of course, which would have required sustained effort.  But still, brains enough to graduate, and to pass the bar exam on the first try, even though instead of studying he'd spent his preparation classes inventing a role-playing game called Lawyers from Hell. 

You'd think I'd have remembered writing that. Well, now that I see it, I do. But that didn't prevent me from writing, in The Penguin Who Knew Too Much, book number eight, the following passage:

"No one should ever talk to the cops without a lawyer," Rob said, shaking his head. I was glad to know that Rob had absorbed that much wisdom from his time at law school. Given Rob's ability to get into trouble, probably worth the whole three years he'd spent learning it, even though he'd never gotten around to taking the bar exam so he could practice law.

Oops. I didn't notice the discrepancy. But my readers did. I've heard from several over the years who have pointed it out.

What could I do? Both books were out there in print, and my mistake in my own fictional world was there for any discerning reader to see.

I thought about it for a while. And came up with a solution. In The Hen of the Baskervilles, book fifteen, the following passage appeared, clearing up--I hope--the discrepancy.

I'm not a contract specialist," Rob said.  He had, in fact, never actually practiced law, in spite of graduating from the University of Virginia's prestigious law school and passing the bar exam on his first try. "But I think it'll be fine if you get her to initial an amended contract tomorrow.  If you decided it wasn't quite as involved as you expected and knocked a couple of hundred off the price, she'd probably sign in a heartbeat. You might want to run that by your own attorney, just to be sure."

"Great idea," Vern said.  "Thanks."

"Just when I think you didn't learn anything in law school, you surprise me," I said.

"Is that like an apology for telling people I flunked the bar exam?" Rob asked.

I winced.

"I never told anyone you flunked the bar exam," I said.  "I probably did tell a few people I wasn't sure you ever bothered to show up for it, but that's completely different. And for the record, you have my apology."

"But I told you I passed it." Rob didn't look angry.  More puzzled.

"Yes, but I thought you only said that to stop all of us from nagging you about when you were going to take it," I explained. "That's what I'd have done if I'd finished law school and decided I was never going to practice and taking the bar exam would be a waste of time."

"Wow.  When you put it that way, it almost sounds like a compliment." Rob ambled off, looking mollified.

And thereby, I hope, any eagle-eyed readers who also spotted the error were also mollified.

Some mistakes are easier to fix than others. Meg's friend Aida, who first appeared as Aida Morris, can be assumed to have experienced either divorce or marriage to account for her reappearance as Aida Butler. Others aren't--for example, in The Nightingale Before Christmas, as Meg and her sons are discussing their upcoming appearance in Trinity Episcopal's Christmas pageant.

“We need new costumes,” Josh had said one night.

“Can’t you wear your costumes from last year?” I’d asked. “Or are they too small?”

Jamie had shrugged.

“Mo-om,” Josh had moaned. “We were animals last year.”

Actually, since they’d been dinosaurs last year, technically they’d been reptiles. And extinct reptiles to boot. Did reptiles count as animals? I could ask Grandfather.

"Well, what do you want to be this year?” I’d asked. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of choices in a nativity play.

Unless Robyn decided to spice things up and add scenes not found in the original text. Based on the boys’ preferences, I suspected a scene with pirates would go down well with most of the participants. Perhaps instead of arriving in Bethlehem on a donkey, the Holy Family could come by boat, allowing Joseph to fend off pirates along the way. Or, better yet, what if the Wise Men could encounter a party of Imperial storm troopers—also bound for Bethlehem and clearly up to no good—and repel the them with their light sabers?

I’d abandoned that train of thought and dragged my mind back to the immediate crisis.

“So if you’re not animals, what are you?” I’d asked. “Angels?”

“Mo-o-om!” I’d been hoping neither of them would learn to roll their eyes like that until they were teenagers. “Girls are angels. And little kids are animals. Big boys are shepherds!”

As more than one reader has probably noticed--though so far only one has pointed it out--reptiles are animals. Not mammals, but definitely animals. No fix I can think of, but I'm going to give Meg a break here--she was in the middle of the holiday frenzy and not thinking straight.

And so it goes. I'm sure my readers can find any number of additional oopses. I fix what I can. And for the rest . . . I wince, acknowledge that I'm fallible, and keep going.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Mark]

I completely missed that both times I read that passage from Nightengale. We will just say that I knew what Meg meant and leave it at that. (She meant that dinosaurs aren’t mammals, and we only have mammals mentioned in the Biblical nativity story.)

I’m not that good about remembering character stuff from book to book. Maybe if I read them back to back I would be, but that never seems to happen.