I’m sorry I’ve gone so long without writing here. It’s because I’ve been writing elsewhere. As in creating a story. The fourth book in the City of Dreams Series - the one that now doesn’t have a title since I’ve axed the Promise idea and come up with nothing else - is well and truly underway. I may be through the first draft some time this summer. Getting stuck in like this has revealed some major whoppers in my original thinking. And those I haven’t spotted on my own have been brought home to me by you, the folks I write for.
First, I’ve gotten a handful of e-mails from the sharp-eyed among you who have picked up a truly terrible historical error in City of Glory. On page 109 one British officer agrees with another that they will press on, and that either Baltimore or Washington would be “their [the Americans] Waterloo…” Trouble is, that exchange takes place in August of 1814 - ten months before the battle of Waterloo in June 1815. How did I make such a gaffe? I do not know. I am nothing if not obsessive about historical detail. And I have a terrific editor who is herself very aware of history. And when she’s done with what the trade calls line editing, thinking about the story as a whole and making suggestions about same, the book (any book with a major publisher) goes through two different rounds of copy-editing. The first is about internal chronology, punctuation, grammar and the like. The second is proof reading for typographical mistakes. Over the years I’ve had the eagle-eyes doing both those jobs spot one or another kind of mistake and query me about same. In this case, no such luck. The egg-on-my-face was wiped off by no one. The responsibility is entirely mine and I hang my head in shame. The line will be changed in the paperback edition out next winter. And a huge thank you to Gary S. and the other readers who spotted the mistake and told me about it.
Next in the catalog of how easy it is to screw up: When I posted the matrix to the new book on this site (and submitted it to Simon & Schuster) I was gleefully calling the main Devrey character Joshua, and the main Turner character Christopher - to be known as Kif. Well, Joshua was another character in City of Glory, where this Devrey makes his first fleeting appearance so he can be developed in this next book. So he became Samuel. (The one I identified as the villain of the piece in an earlier blog). And I only recently realized that the character of Christopher (Kif) Turner is already in full blown print in the first book, City of Dreams. Right there in that family tree that so many of us labored over so painstakingly. (I cannot tell you what’s involved in proofing something like that…) Son of Andrew Turner and born in 1770. The character in this new book, a young man in 1832, is meant to be Andrew’s grandson. Do you know how many readers woud write me about that? The same name as his father maybe, but the same nickname… I made him Nicholas and he’s already working better on the page.
And here’s one I hope is not a mistake - City of Glory has been nominated for the David J. Langum Sr. prize in American Historical Fiction. Seems to me that my work is far too commercial for these folks, but I’m honored to be considered. Hope they don’t say oops… How did we make that gaffe?