It’s Monday afternoon. I’m at 45.2% on the manuscript for The Taken Ones and need to get back to it, but if there’s going to be a blog this week, now’s the time to write it. I’m hoping it’ll be short but sweet.

Over the course of forty-plus years of doing book signings, I’ve had some wonderful experiences. I’ve also had some interesting ones, and when I say interesting, I mean not necessarily in a good way.

Right at the top of that chart would be the grand re-opening of the Smoky Point Safeway north of Seattle. At that event, one of the first people in line was a young man who approached me and said, “Are you the lady who writes murder mysteries?” When I allowed as how I was, he continued. “I’ve just been acquitted of murdering seven people. Do you want to write my book?” How many times can you say, NO, THANK YOU? What I told him instead was that I didn’t do true crime and generously suggested he contact Ann Rule. By the way, she wouldn’t touch his story, either!

Today, while I was getting my steps, Bill was watching a taped Great Railways program from PBS. Sure enough, a different piece of interesting book signing history stepped off the screen, namely the one on the Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad. Sometime in the late nineties, a no-longer-extant mystery bookstore in Milwaukee booked me to do a series of talks and signings in the dining cars on one of their three-hour excursions through Wisconsin farm country. It turned out to be a lot like that three-hour cruise to Gilligan’s Island.

Part way through the trip, the train made an unscheduled stop at a railroad station in an unnamed small town due to the fact that there was a dead cow on the track ahead of us. (It was Wisconsin after all. Why wouldn’t there be a dead cow on the track?) That unanticipated delay meant that we had to cancel the remainder of the trip and head back. As a result, I was told there wouldn’t be time for me to do dining car talks, and I was asked to deliver my “speech” on the train platform. As I did so, I couldn’t help but think of all the campaigning politicians down through history who had delivered their platform speeches from … well … train platforms. I think of it as my Abraham Lincoln moment!

By the way, the Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad still exists, and from what I saw on the screen, their three-hour trips are a lot more upscale these days.

And now for a total change of subject. Longtime readers (LTRs) are familiar with my lingo. DTRs, Dead Tree Readers, are the ones who prefer books of the paper and ink variety. ARs are Audio Readers. RRs are Re-Readers who go through my books again and again. IORs are In Order Readers. Today we’ll be touching on SERs—Sharp-Eyed Readers. Those most likely include any number of retired English teachers who spot every typo with eagle-eyed precision and don’t hold back when letting me know about them. But just because SERs are picky, don’t think I don’t appreciate them. The errors they report to me are immediately passed along to my editors in New York so that corrections can be made prior to the book’s next print run, and every corrected error makes me look that much smarter.

This week, however, an SER pointed out a small but telling plot error in The Girl From Devil’s Lake. A detail written into the beginning of the book is different by the end of the book. Fixing it meant removing the wording in part of a single paragraph, and that correction is now in my editor’s hands.

I’m not going to specify exactly what that error is. I’m simply going to let you know it exists.

It’ll be interesting to see how many SERs will go back to the book determined to sort it out for themselves. Happy Hunting, you guys. When you figure it out, please feel free to let me know. We’ll call this a literary Easter egg hunt.