The joys of editing - oops where did that come from?

[Ronn Munsterman]

From a blog post today:

I'm working on edit #3 of the new Sgt. Dunn Novel, SS Assassins. Found a few things that were the result of the length of time it takes to write a book. You write something early in the book, and kind of "forget" you did. This can result in saying something else about the same thing.

The best one was in reference to a house. In an earlier chapter I said it was built in the 1500s. Later, I specifically state it was built 41 years ago (which of course, would be 1903 in the story line). Glad I found it myself. Stayed with 1903 and fixed the early reference.

Now back to work, lad. As Saunders would say.

[LilyBLily]

I discovered that I'd had a person ask a friend if she knew where her missing boyfriend was--and then in the same conversation act as if they had plans to get married and everything was cool. That book took eight years to write, and I forgot a lot along the way.   

[Doglover]

One of my heroines suffered an eleven month pregnancy, but none of my readers noticed. Two years after publication I reread the book myself and thought: 'hey, that can't be right'. 

[Jeff Tanyard]

One of my heroines suffered an eleven month pregnancy, but none of my readers noticed. Two years after publication I reread the book myself and thought: 'hey, that can't be right'. 

One of my characters had a three-month pregnancy.  But I write science fiction, and the pregnancy was a bizarre genetic engineering mishap, so it's okay.   

[TimothyEllis]

When I did the rebadge for series 2, I found in series 4 I'd used a character I'd forgotten I'd already used in 2.

So I had a character in 2 galaxies at the same time.

No-one noticed.

But I did a very quick retcon on series 2 since I had to edit the backmatter anyway, replacing with 2 other characters I hadn't used out of early series 1. Problem solvered.

[VanessaC]

I'm going through a very rough first draft just now and was reviewing a conversation between two characters when I had a "now, how did they know that?" moment. No telepathy in my world! Easily fixed, thankfully.

I'm also using dictation to get the first draft down on the screen and finding some really extraordinary phrases - my favourite from book 1 was "this town is full of carrots" instead of "this town is full of cowards".

Keeps me on my toes, though!

[DrewMcGunn]

I had this happen to me on my latest book.  I missed it on my first round of edits and my editor also missed it (but in fairness, I'm not paying him to confirm continuity stuff). I caught it on my final pre-publish edit, where I print out the entire manuscript and take a red-inked pen to it.