When I wrote my first historical YA, Samantha and the Cowboy, I had a scene where—following a day of herding cattle with their bandannas up over their noses—my heroine thinks the hero looks like a raccoon with all the dust around his eyes. My manuscript came back with a note: “I think of raccoons as being around streams and in woods. I don’t think a girl who grew up in Texas would know what a raccoon was.”
I live in a suburb near Dallas, a creek runs through our neighborhood. About the time that I got the manuscript back for revisions, something was digging in my front yard. I set a trap that would capture, not hurt, whatever creature was having fun in my yard. Yep, you guessed it. It was a raccoon. I sent a note to my editor, “Guess what? I just caught a raccoon in my front yard. We have streams, trees, and raccoons in Texas. She would know what a raccoon was.”
Of course, the digging continued. We also caught a possum and an armadillo.
One of the things that I love about Texas is that no matter what sort of terrain you want for your story—you’ll find it here. Desert, mountains, hills, woods, plains, beaches, islands . . . we’ve got it. As a writer, I’m able to set stories in Texas and still have very different locations.
Of course, when you write about Texas and Texans, you sometimes get other comments from copy editors.
In The Outlaw and the Lady, I had a hero who would always say that he was aggravated when he was angry. “Don’t aggravate me.” It’s a phrase I picked up from my father-in-law who is always saying how aggravating things are when they upset him. “It was aggravatin’.” The copy editor went through the manuscript and changed every aggravated to “annoyed” and wrote a note—“Don’t use aggravated when you mean annoyed.” I wrote a note back—“I didn’t. I meant aggravated.” (Truly, can you see an outlaw being annoyed?) So I went through and changed them all back.
And then we get the fact checkers. For my first book, Sweet Lullaby, the hero visits a prostitute. He pays her $2. The copy editor put a note on the manuscript: “Was $2 a fair payment back then?” It was if she worked in a high-class brothel. Since it was my first book, I didn’t realize that I could just answer her query with a “yes.” Instead I wrote a thesis about prostitution in the old west and included it with my notes back to the copy editor.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the copy editors. They do find mistakes that I’ve made: wrong word, changing the year of a story and not remembering to change the title of a book the heroine was reading—a book not published until after the year in which the story takes place. Things that if they didn’t catch, a reader would.
I have a friend who is a freelance copy editor. And oh, the stories she tells from her perspective! Maybe we should have her as a guest sometime.
Truly, I would much rather be a writer than a copy editor. And now I need to get back to my copy edited manuscript.
Hi Lorraine – I do love my copy editors, but sometimes they do make you laugh. With my first western, Lily Gets Her Man – Lily longed so much for a garden of her own. She planted flowers and as a metaphor for the story, she planted lilies. The copyeditor didn’t think lilies grew in west Texas, so my Hussy friends (Harlequin authors) helped me dig up the facts. I kept the lilies in the story and just months later, randomly, my mother-in-law from just outside of Dallas, sent up a big huge box of lily bulbs, with a note saying they’ll get huge and colorful in no time. She didn’t know about my “lily” dilemma with the CE. And you know, that was years ago and those lilies are still growing in my CA garden, straight from Texas!
The change my copy editor made that this reminded me of was in my historical Alaska series my heroine is walking down a stream and I have her see a bald eagle and trout darting past in the crystal clear water and other lovely scene setting creatures.
I also have her see a marmet. No doubt I googled Alaska wildlife and picked a likely creature. Only somewhere between me reading the word marmet and typing the word I changed it to marmoset.
Aren’t those words similar, both is spelling AND obscurity?
Trouble is, while a marmet is a furry, rodent-ish otter, beaver, mink type creature. A marmoset is a South American monkey. NOT gonna be in Alaska.
So the editor caught that and I fixed it and I still wonder if the editor just thought I was INSANE for having an equitorical monkey in my Alaskan stream.
equatorial?
Hi Lorraine! Lovely post. I love your topic — Texas! I may be the only person in Kentucky who has prickly pear thriving in her back yard — yep, straight from Texas. I’ve had it for years. It absolutely flourishes for me. I’ve given starter pads to a lot of people, and they end up dying. (the cactus, not the people)They must not love it as much as I do. LOL!
The biggest misconception I’ve run into around here is that Texas is all a blowing, rocky desert, like it’s usually portrayed in the movies. When I tell people the Houston area (where my mom lives) has an almost tropical climate, they find it hard to believe.
I don’t have any copy editor stories — for which I’m thankful.
)
Hi Lorraine! When I got my copy edits back on Give Me a Texan, I found she changed all the Panhandle references to lower case, even when I had the word Texas in front of it. And she changed body in the phrase “What was a body to do?” to man. And there were a few other Texas colloquialisms she changed that were funny but I can’t remember them right off. But, she did catch my wreak and ruin phrase and corrected it to the proper rack and ruin. One author told me of an experience she had where the copy editor changed all of her “chutes” to “shoots.”
So hilarious. We must drive all those copy editors crazy with our Texas talk. Don’t think they know what to make of us. But we love ‘em. All we have to do is educate them on our part of the world. Keeps us on our toes.
We used to own a lake house here in Texas and one year when we went to open it up, we found raccoon tracks all over it. It’d climbed down the chimney, got in the flour, and everything else it could find. Then it left the same way it came.
Great post, Lorraine!
Hope you got all those pesky critters out of your yard. They’re pretty destructive.
Great posts, y’all. Thanks for sharing. I did complain to my copy editor friend about something that was questioned in one of my YA manuscripts. The heroine, a teen, woke up thinking, “I wish morning had never been invented.” The CE put a note, “Morning wasn’t invented. Change?”
I couldn’t believe she thought that I really thought morning had been “invented.” My CE friend told me she would have questioned it, too. She said they have to question everything that reads odd to them – better to check and make sure the author wrote what she intended than to risk not catching something.
I ask you, “What’s a body to do?”
What an interesting post! I often wonder about what feedback authors get when they mention copy edits and whatnot. As a reader all I get to see is the final product. I guess it is better to be safe than sorry (especially since there are some eagle-eyed readers out there), but I can see how it can get bothersome (and be funny) to authors who have done their research or know first-hand. I have read some books though where I wonder how things get past copy editors and other people who read the books (mostly continuity errors or inconsistencies in background stories).
BTW, The Outlaw and the Lady is one of my fave books!! Of course, I love all of Lorraine’s books…LOL
I had to laugh at Linda’s post. I’m one of the co-authors in “Give Me a Texan” and one correction they wanted was to change potbelly stove to pottied belly stove! I laughed until I nearly cried. Yes, we all had trouble with Texasiums on that one … and I think between the four of us (all from the Panhandle, except for precious Linda LOL) we used about every Texasium ever spoken and made up some of our own.
I love the story about the raccoon, Lorraine! I absolutely loved your story in “All My Heros are Cowboys”! Phyliss
Great post!
It’s great to hear all these stories. What I love best about westerns is getting the flavor of the area the story is set in and you can’t get that if the character’s aren’t speaking true to the area.
I love Western stories !! we have racoons around where we live i just asummed everyone had them They are adorable. I love to read but i know there is alot writers have to go threw in writting their stories I would love to write a book one day but i don’t think i would have the patience I have alot of wonderful things i would write about because i’m very creative But i think writer’s are very special people and it’s not enough to just have great ideas you have to be able to put them together and deliver them I’m so thankfull that they’re so many talented writer’s for those of us that enjoy reading their work.