My main pet peeve is the misuse of French. Some errors are minor; some are major, as if the author didn’t even bother to look up the basics beyond “oui” and “non”. But I’ve never felt the need to inform the authors/publishers personally. My two cents: There are multilingual readers who can tell the difference. Just saying.

But it irks me to no end when authors throw in skating details so wrong that it’s obvious the closest they’ve ever come to a rink is watching Disney on Ice. The tell-tale to me is when the plot involves a competitive skater at the National or World Championships and the scores are announced as “perfect 10s”. Figure skating – at least on the Olympic end of it has never used 10 as a scoring base. The older system had 6.0 as the top mark (and it was “marks” and not “score.”) About abou six years ago the scoring system was changed to a “Code of Points” system where the highest total points wins and scores (Yes, “scores”) at the world and national levels are in the 100s. The only event sthat used “10″ as a mark were some made-for-tv professional competitions that had celebrity judges and featured skaters no longer competiting at the Olympic level; they were more shows than competitions since everybody got paid just to show up and very often the audience got to vote along with the panel.

The only time I wrote to an author though was when one had her Regency heroine lacing up white figure skates for a turn around the pond. White skates didn’t exist until the early 20th century when Sonja Henie introduced them to shocase her tiny feet. Back in Regency days, skates were just blades that strapped on to regular shoes. I don’t remember the exact response but it was basically, “Oh, no one toher than a figure skating historian would know that so who cares.” I’ve never read another of that author’s work.

And getting titles wrong really, really bothers me as well.

The only time I got annoyed was when a reader sent me a really NASTY email saying how stupid and lazy I was for getting the name of a movie wrong. I’d mentioned Philadelphia Story instead of High Society…same story, one was the musical with Bing Crosby, one the non-musical with Cary Grant. Anyway, I gritted my teeth and wrote back to thank her, only to get an instant-reply that my email was blocked from writing to her! Which told me she just wanted the chance to ream me out.

Danielle D: I just got done reading a book were the heroine lives in Chicago — instead of calling Michigan Avenue the Magnificant Mile she called it the Miracle Mile which is in Los Angeles. I have to admit that it took me right out ofthe book.No, I didn’t write the author!

Was it mine? Cause I did that once…felt like a total idiot once I actually got the book in print and read it. I did know better, just had a complete brain fart!

Elizabeth

Mistakes happen. Sometimes, the “mistake” is not a mistake at all. I’ve had people write to me to tell me something was wrong, when in fact, it wasn’t. I had a reviewer take down the score on a baseball book I was involved in (an anthology) because we had a pro team possibly moving to Las Vegas–this reviewer insisted this was impossible because of all these laws. (I can’t remember the details…it was a while ago.)

This was not something we researched, to be honest. I believed the reviewer. (Book was out, nothing I could do.) But guess what? I live in Tampa and the Rays might move if they don’t get a new stadium and guess where they might go? Las Vegas.

So who is right?

Before I was published, I had a historical romance author grade down a contest entry I’d submitted because of “historical inaccuracy.” I’d spent months doing research–I knew what I’d written was correct. So again, who is right?

And does it really matter?

To me, all that matters is if I enjoyed a book. The characters and the story are much more important than the minutiae. I’ve never written to an author, probably because I know how hard it is to get all the facts right and because chances are, I could be wrong about what I think is wrong. However, I will confess that if a book has too many questionable facts, I do put it down.