I just (re)learned how different reading on a screen and reading on paper are for me. I wrote this scene about two years ago, and have probably re-read it over twenty times. Last night in the tub, reading my new copy of my manuscript (thanks, Lulu!), I realized there was a big problem.
Althea is 13, and has a younger brother(Rudy) and two moms.
All my characters feel pretty real to me. All but one are completely made up. The one is 'Mom'. She's a better version of me.
Here's the scene. I wonder if you can guess what the problem is.
Mom walked in then and listened for a bit. “It’s fun listening to you all talk about those. When I first started playing with these ten years ago, I struggled with a bunch of them, even though I had already been teaching math for over twenty years. What I usually teach is more related to algebra than geometry, so I still felt like a beginner.”
Aiden looked really surprised at that.
Well, Althea's mom is about 35. (And I'm 68.) With the ten and twenty years she mentions, she had to start teaching at about 5 years old! Oops. I guess I'll change that to 'five years ago', and 'almost ten years'.
Lots of advance readers have read this passage, and didn't mention that 'Mom' sounds pretty old to have a 13-year-old daughter. I guess that's a hard one to catch.
Posts
Editing on paper is so important. Another thing that helps is to audio-edit: listen to the text as you read. (Word can do text-to-speech, or you can find an app to do it.)
ReplyDeleteBut no matter how hard you try, you'll pick up the book a year after publication and notice some glaring error that nobody noticed through all the steps of publication. I think mistakes breed when we're not looking, like dust bunnies.
Yep! And thanks for the suggestion, I will try to find a good text-to-speech app.
ReplyDeleteA 53-year-old woman can have a 13-year-old daughter, which would have her starting teaching at 23. f course, that may not be what you wanted, but it would be hard for a beta reader to say it was erroneous.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, of course. But I do mention both moms being in grad school when Althea is born, so that makes it less likely. (Some of the advance readers talked with me weekly, and knew the timelines I had made up.)
ReplyDelete