We’re getting more questions from everyone which is great! Keep them coming. We can’t answer them all but we’ll surely try! Email Carly at carly@carlyphillips.com
Julie Stark asked:
Do you ever wish you could go back and rewrite an already published story?
CP: I think I’m the rare writer who, once they put a story to bed, puts it out of her mind and moves on. Janelle and I have an expression that we use constantly during the writing of a book: “It is what it is.” For me, if it could be different, it would be. If it could have been an easier book to write, it would have been. So I can be frustrated more by the process that produces the story than the story itself. Once it’s on paper, the characters are alive and “it is what it is.” How bizarre, huh?
JEL: I wish I could be as Zen about it as Janelle and Carly, but yes, there are books I wish I could go back and rewrite–at least parts of them. Oh okay, there’s *one* book that I don’t like the beginning of and a certain conflict thread. I’m not saying which book, but it’s an older one and I’ve never ONCE had a reader complain about the opening of this book or anything, but it bothers me. I know why I made the choices at the time, but in the end, I didn’t think it worked as well as it should have. As a writer now, I would have made different choices.
But to be honest, what bothers me more is when books I loved are distributed badly and no one read them at all. That happened with my book, MAKING WAVES. I *love* that book–think it’s perhaps my most ambitious work–but hardly anyone read it because of distribution. I can honestly say I think I received one or two emails about it when I usually get a lot more. Ah, well. Hopefully it will be reprinted someday.
LK: I have never wanted to rewrite an entire story, but there is one book that has a couple of errors that made it through editing. I would love to fix those if the book ever went back to print. Won’t say which book…but it has a scene where a gun is left somewhere when it shouldn’t have been, AND, in the same book, the hero takes off the heroine’s shirt twice during a love scene…lol!
CP: Yes, now that Leslie mentioned MISTAKES, I have tons that my readers have caught. THOSE THINGS I’d love to go back and change. Good point, Les.
JD: I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to go back and rewrite an already published story. Once the story is done, like Carly said, “It is what it is,” and I don’t know that it would have turned out any differently had I taken less time to write the story, more time to write the story, or any other component of writing skills. Some books are a breeze to write, and others are a struggle from chapter one. But, in the end, through edits and revisions and a critique partner’s guidance, I do believe that the story “is what it is,” and you just can’t agonize over it, or else you’ll end up mentally and creatively blocked.
What’s amazing to me, is that a lot of times a book that I or Carly angst over the most and feel as though it’s pure crap, it’ll get the best reader response and reviews, LOL. Then, we’ll write a book and personally love it and think it’s one of our best, and it’ll get the opposite response! I think that’s a big part of the reason why I’ve learned, and accepted, that a book will be what it’ll be in the end, and there’s no telling how the book and story will be received/judged by readers until it’s out in bookstores.
Now, like every author, I would love to be able to go back and rewrite continuity mistakes within a book or series I’ve written. I know I’ve made some continuity errors in my Wilde series that readers have written to me about, and it’s times like those that you want to stop the presses and fix the mistake before any more books are distributed, LOL! We try our best to keep track of every aspect of our characters, story, and plot, but sometimes we do goof-up! 
Destiny
Dirty Little Secrets
Once Upon A Valentine
Through The Night
Subscribe to Posts 
Comment
Great question. I loved all the Wilde books, didnt notice anything wrong. What exactly is a continuity mistake?
Comment
Continuity mistakes are usually in a series. Like in my Marisela books, if I said in book one that she was fourteen when she joined the gang, I have to make sure she was fourteen in book two, and not thirteen or some other number. When you have multiple characters with different pasts showing up in multiple books, it is VERY hard to keep it all straight. The editors try to work on it, but errors happen because frankly, there is much more important stuff to worry about.
My SIL just read an ARC of Dirty Little Lies and caught an error (twice!) that might make it into print because we think we caught it too late. It could end up being confusing for the reader, so I’m hoping they can make the fix. It’s just ONE WORD in both cases–a person’s name flip-flopped with another related character–and no matter how many people read that book in advance, no one caught it but my SIL! We’re human and mistakes happen.
Comment
It REALLY bothers me that copy editors don’t catch this stuff.
Forget how many I’ve had!
Comment
This is a great question, and I found your answers interesting.
When a book goes to reprint or is released again a few years down the road, does the Author get a chance to fix some things that might have been missed in the first printing or have a say in any of it ??
Have a great 4th of July weekend…………
Comment
Hi, Cryna. It just depends. If the errors are big enough and the author is notified in enough time, the errors might be able to be fixed. However, I had a book recently reprinted that had an error in it and I didn’t have enough time to make the fix (honestly, I’d forgotten all about it!) It’s an error in Italian, so I think people assume it’s right when it is not…and it drives me crazy!
To join Carly’s
…I do get annoyed if it’s continuity within one book. The copy editor’s job is to catch this stuff and when they don’t, I get very 
But, they’re human, too, I guess.
Comment
Interesting questions & answers.
One thing that will sometimes puzzle me in a book is when in a scene a person starts out in say a skirt & all of a sudden is wearing pants–same scene! I thought that is what editing is for!!:smile: It makes me feel like all the people involved don’t give the readers credit for having a brain or noticing details. Another pet peeve is when something is geographically incorrect–maps & other information is readily available through the internet so if an author isn’t familiar with an area this information can be researched. I don’t remember this being true of any of the authors in Plotmonkeys but one scene in particular has stayed in my little pea brain! I have no idea what book it was or the author it is just one of those little details that bugged me & has stayed with me.:roll:
Have a great weekend everyone.:cheer:
Comment
Donna, you have no idea how easy it is for little details to go unnoticed. Don’t be mad at the author or the editor…seriously. Authors and editors are looking at the big stuff–like characterization, emotion and conflict. The clothing is on the side. I’m not saying that authors don’t try to be consistent…they do! But mistakes happen for a variety of reasons.
I’ll give you an example. When I was reading over the page proofs on Dirty Little Lies, the color of Marisela’s dress changed three times. I remembered changing it from blue to purple (to match the cover!) but I missed one so it went from purple to blue to purple again! It’s not that I didn’t think readers would notice…it’s just that the change wasn’t made consistently. I was able to fix that one.
As for maps and research, you have no idea how easy it is to make mistakes even when you research like crazy. Or sometimes, things get changed after the author has already made her last read-through. I’ve had copy editors change things before that were dead wrong…but their information told them it was right. I know it’s annoying, but honestly, most authors really are trying hard to be accurate. You have no idea how many maps I own or how many weird phone calls I’ve made in the name of research…but still mistakes (or most often, misinterpretations) are made. It happens.
Comment
I think what I wish readers would understand the most is that we try our best. Always. And we struggle oftentimes you never know what it took to write the book or what was going on in our lives at the time. And despite EVERYONE’S best efforts, things get through – I forgot a pregnancy from Hot Number to Hot Item and changed the sex of Anabelle’s baby by mistake. Nobody caught it (my fault for not writing it down I guess) and the copy editor would be at fault but I discovered they don’t always read for continuity or the same series. You could get two different copy editors. I received close to 25 letters since Hot Item hit shelves and my answer is always the same – I’M HUMAN. And I’msorry.
Comment
What a great question and one I have often wondered about too. I found your answers very interesting and informative.
Comment
Now if either of you (Carly & Julie) get anymore letters about this I say tell them to
And if you want an extra set of eyes to peruse any ARC’s of your books I would volunteer in a heartbeat. :grin:
Comment
Interesting topic. As a reader, I always catch the errors –grammatical, punctuation, spelling (I chalk those up to the editing process) and the continuity (I chalk those up to the author, sorry to say). Like one I read recently, where the daughter was 14 at the beginning of the book, which was used to explain her reaction to a particular event, and then by the end of the book, which spanned a six month period, the same daughter was 16! That’s annoying! Could be a typo, I presume but things like this throw the reader off.
As a writer, however, I’m humbled. I see how it happens with experienced writers and I’m thinking I’ll be lucky if my first book has my name spelled correctly on the cover, and all of the chapters make it into print!
Ladies, just keep writing the great stuff that you do, for our reading pleasure and our writing education!
Comment
I’m also guilty of having a few problems about some of the details. There are times when I just get a detail wrong in my head–thinking I’d established a character as this age or with those colored eyes, and later in the book, I’ve switched. Sometimes I’ll catch it, sometimes the editor will, but not always. I know I’ve had things happen like with names where I’ve given a character the name x and later I realize I have too many characters whose names start with the same letter, and I’ll do a search replace and change one of them. But sometimes, even those global search replaces don’t catch them all–or they can change the wrong word. I had a character named Ann once and I changed her name to something, did it globally and then realized that’d been a big goof. Every word with ann in it was changed to, say, Mary. So you’d have, “We’re going on our maryual trip to the beach for our maryiversary.” Oy.
And there are times when you do something early in a book and you change it later and you think you caught every reference to it, but you missed one. Writing a 450 page book (which all of my s.t.’s are) takes a few months and the more you read it, the less you actually *see* any of the words. Does that make sense? It’s like your brain fills things in and you just skim right over them, so it’s super-hard to catch mistakes.
Great conversation!
Comment
Well I think you guys write great stories:cooldance:. Especially the series. What is is about series books or trilogies that make me like them the best. i guess it is because I fall in love with the family or something.
I know there have been papers I have written that I didn’t think were that great and got them back later and thought to myself “I wrote that” i didn’t think I had it in me.:happy2:
As for the mistakes I enjoy seeing a few mistakes every now and then. the one thing that drives me crazy is mispelled words. I mean that is why you guys have people at the publishing house to proof read the before the book goes to print. You would think they could hit spell check or something.:doggie: