One of the things I really liked about Private Arrangements was the historically-appropriate metaphors–such a treat!

Thanks, Bettie. Some of those took a long time to come up with–how’s that phrase to drive a copyeditor nuts–so I’m happy somebody noticed.

I remember in Judith Ivory’s Black Silk, she had a footnote about magenta: that it wasn’t quite invented yet, but she felt there was no other color that suited the hero’s mistress as well as that, so she used it anyway.

Gwen,

LOL, it’s not the English mistakes that I’m worried about. It’s the factchecking part. A good copyeditor will catch where you are sloppy. They will look up words to see whether they were in use in the era and see that if you mention a historical personage, whether that person was alive then etc.

On the third round of copyediting for PA, the copyeditor caught a mistake that escaped everyone prior to that. I’d referred to Queen Elizabeth as “young” when the Spanish Armada sank. She was in her fifties. I somehow thought that she was new on the throne when it happened–erroneous memory from some reading I’d done in high school–and I never looked it up myself. It’s that kind of mistakes, when I really don’t know what I think I know, for which it’s sooooo helpful to have an eagle-eyed and diligent copyeditor.

As for odd anachronisms, I submit Mauve & Magenta. Mauve, the first commercially successful synthetic dye, was not invented until 1865. Magenta soon followed. I’ve seen magenta mentioned a few times in Regencies–usually to describe the hideous waistcoat of a Regency-era fop. Also, the original mauve fades quickly, so the color the Victorians called Mauve was considerably brighter than current definitions of the color.

I can’t pick on anyone else’s anachronisms without mentioning one of my own. Specifically, in a story set in a pre-industrial society I once described a fabric as “jacquard” though the jacquard fabric was named for the loom invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801 (d’oh!). On the plus side, after realizing my mistake, I looked up the great man, and found that the punch cards used to define operations of the jacquard loom were an important step toward the development of computer programming (yes, I am a huge geek, but this is fascinating stuff to sci-fi writers). Ok. I’ll shut up now.

German, perhaps? I hear their nouns get particularly challenging.

I’ve always thought of you as a hard one to impress. So I’m glad you liked my posts.

Gwen,

I was under the impression that both “could care less” and “couldn’t care less” mean exactly the same thing. Read it somewhere in an article about phrases that should mean opposites but don’t.

And yes in MY books. I’ve a hard time with commas–I’ve never met one I couldn’t press into service, apparently. So I think half of all my editor’s and copyeditors’ proofreading marks are to take out excess commas.

My editor pushes me hard, so I’m always having to write better–which I need, b/c I’m a lazy ass left to my own devices. The copyeditor for PA caught a ton of things, some of which I listed up above, a lot I don’t remember any more. The copyeditor for Delicious didn’t catch that many things, and I’m actually very nervous about it, because I expected a lot of things to be caught.

Bev,

Ain’t it awful? At least these days we can do a universal search.

Maureen,

Good for you both!

Sherry – what was the process like working with editors and copy proofers? Do they catch a lot of that in early drafts? Not in YOUR books, of course, but in general.

Sherry, I’m enjoying these posts immensely, thank you for being here! (and thank you duckies for inviting her over)