{"id":3374,"date":"2025-12-12T06:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T14:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=3374"},"modified":"2025-12-12T10:48:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T18:48:21","slug":"short-but-sweet-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2025\/12\/12\/short-but-sweet-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Short but Sweet"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Monday afternoon. I\u2019m at 45.2% on the manuscript for The Taken Ones<\/em> and need to get back to it, but if there\u2019s going to be a blog this week, now\u2019s the time to write it. I\u2019m hoping it\u2019ll be short but sweet.<\/p>\n

Over the course of forty-plus years of doing book signings, I\u2019ve had some wonderful experiences. I\u2019ve also had some interesting ones, and when I say interesting, I mean not necessarily in a good way.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cAre you the lady who writes murder mysteries?\u201d When I allowed as how I was, he continued. \u201cI\u2019ve just been acquitted of murdering seven people. Do you want to write my book?\u201d How many times can you say, NO, THANK YOU? What I told him instead was that I didn\u2019t do true crime and generously suggested he contact Ann Rule. By the way, she wouldn\u2019t touch his story, either!<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Island.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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 \u201cspeech\u201d on the train platform. As I did so, I couldn\u2019t help but think of all the campaigning politicians down through history who had delivered their platform speeches from \u2026 well \u2026 train platforms. I think of it as my Abraham Lincoln moment!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll be touching on SERs\u2014Sharp-Eyed Readers. Those most likely include any number of retired English teachers who spot every typo with eagle-eyed precision and don\u2019t hold back when letting me know about them. But just because SERs are picky, don\u2019t think I don\u2019t 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\u2019s next print run, and every corrected error makes me look that much smarter.<\/p>\n

This week, however, an SER pointed out a small but telling plot error in The Girl From Devil\u2019s Lake<\/em>. 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\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to specify exactly what that error is. I\u2019m simply going to let you know it exists.<\/p>\n

It\u2019ll 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\u2019ll call this a literary Easter egg hunt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Monday afternoon. I\u2019m at 45.2% on the manuscript for The Taken Ones and need to get back to it, but if there\u2019s going to be a blog this week, now\u2019s the time to write it. I\u2019m hoping it\u2019ll be short but sweet. Over the course of forty-plus years of doing book signings, I\u2019ve had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Short but Sweet","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Sq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3374"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3376,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3374\/revisions\/3376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}