By PJ Parrish (still with one paw but typing better, thanks)

I’m not the first person to ask this question and won’t be the last: What has happened to editors? Did all the good ones get sucked up into the alien ship back in ’45 with the lost airmen of Flight 19? If so, are they ever coming back?

Back when I was part of traditional publishing, I used to dread the day when the galleys arrived. Back in the those dark ages, you would get a fat package in the mail of the actual type-set book. It was pretty, until you looked closely. The galleys were riddled with typos, mistakes, and weird formatting. Now, I knew some of this was my fault. But these were the days when there were whole staffs of copy editors at our disposal to help make us poor writers look better.

Jump to present times. Or maybe not. Things are even worse now. With mergers of major publishers, cutbacks of in-house staff and out-sourcing, and a general decline in editing skills of young folks coming into the business, errata is everywhere. And what about those of us who self-pub? Who can we rely on to make sure our stories emerge clean and readable?

This is on my mind for three reasons today. One, I just finished reading a major novel that had so many typos in it I got angry.

Second, a friend who is still pubbed by one of the major houses called me to vent about the evils of Track Changes. This is a function within Word wherein an outsider (usually an editor) makes mechanical notes in the margins of your manuscript. I hated Track Changes. The whole vivacious give-and-take between writer and editor was gone. Nuance was lost. Emotion subsumed. Sort of like what happened when we starting texting instead of calling each other.

The third reason is that I am editing one of backlist titles, An Unquiet Grave, to reissue via self-pubbing. I am appalled at the typos and mistakes I am finding. And this book already went through the Simon & Schuster prettification machine.

Geez. What an old crab I sound like today. Forgive me.

Let’s back up with this diatribe. I got into this novel racket back in 1979 as a writer of mainstream women’s fiction. That was the euphemism of the era for big fat books about sex, power and dysfunctional families. I had a terrific line editor, but even more impressive was the quality of the copy editing in those days. Through the four books I did for Ballantine/Fawcett I was blessed with the pickiest, most obsessive, anal-grammarians an author could ever wish for. They caught my misspellings, my lay-lie transgressions, my syntax sins.

My favorite copy editor was the one I had for my British editions. This woman — for some reason, I pictured her as a spinster sitting by the fire in some Devonshire outpost surrounded by cats — dripped blood-red pencil all over my pages. At one point, she scribbled in the margins next to my French phrases: “I don’t believe, based on the English errors uncovered thus far in this novel, that we should trust the author’s ability to write in another language.” She also took me to task for my “crutches”: “This author has an unfortunate propensity to use “stare” and “padded” (e.g. he padded toward the door). Would suggest striking every reference.”

I hated that woman. God, how I miss her now.

Every author has horror stories about bad editing. I had a copy editor who changed the color of key lime pie to green. Being in Manhattan, I guess she never saw a key lime  — which is yellow. But shoot, I was the one who had to answer the boy-are-you-dumb emails from fellow Floridians. And then there is the infamous Patricia Cornwell gaffe — the back cover copy that talked about a grizzly murder — which set off a whole new sub-genre, the serial killer bear.

Like I said, I am not abdicating my responsibility. But when you spend eight months to a year writing a book, you get so close to it sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest. You’re so intent on plot and character, you forget you’ve changed a character’s name halfway through. Or that it’s MackiNAW City but MackiNAC Island. Or that loons don’t stick around Michigan in winter…they migrate. One year I got so paranoid I hired a copy editor. She caught so many mistakes it made me even more paranoid about what still lay (lie? lain?) beneath.

So, now here I am, a retired writer who is still suffering from “galley” anxiety this week. Still dreading those typos, the errant error, the stupid mistakes. Do I hire another free lance editor? They don’t come cheap. But editing your own book is like trying to be your own lawyer — only fools do it.

I dread going into battle. Because these days, no one has my back.

Thanks for listening, friends.

I just finished a three-day inaugural city-wide event in Garland, Texas, which featured my first Tucker Snow novel, Hard Country. This great honor was calledOne Book – One Garland, and was a gathering of readers and book clubs that culminated with a meet the author night, an in-conversation interview between myself and a former student who is now the Director ofCommunications for one of Texas’ largest school districts, and my typical avant garde writing workshop.

My workshops aren’t hands-on critique, practice events, but adiscussion of writing, research, the challenges I’ve experienced and overcome, and tips to polish would-be authors’ work. It was a fluid discussion that hopefully answered most of the questions from over thirty attendees.

I surprised them at the outset. “What do you want to know or hear about?”

Those who’d been to workshops tilted their heads at me like a dog looking at a new pan. This was something new.

That opened the dance to a variety of questions about writing, and comments on Hard Country. One lady made my head swell enough to need a new, larger hat. “I was impressed by the amount of detail in your books. I’ve read most of them since I discovered your work and wanted to say the specifics in your novels makes me part of your story. I grew up in those areas you write about, and the wonder how much research you do to make them so realistic and interesting.”

I had to think about that one. Growing up in the areas I write about brings that sense of reality she was talking about, and the little tidbits I learned growing up adds to the rich stew of fiction. And speaking of senses, writers should use all five in their novels without making it obvious they want readers to smell, feel, or see. But what she thought was weeks of research boiled down to reading and listening to the radio.

The idea for one major twist in Hard Country came fully formed from listening to the radio, and a program by local radio host Ed Wallace, who talked about that for a few minutes one lazy Saturday morning before moving on to another topic.

It happens when my protagonists discover that vehicles now are so advanced they download all the information on your phones the minute a driver starts the engine. That info includes online purchases, music preferences, and internet searches. They also gather information about driving habits, braking, speeding, and even each time a driver swerves in their own lane of travel.

The initial plot for Hard Country (and more realistic details) came from years of dealing with a meth house across the gravel road from our family ranch. More reality on this subject came when the meth-heads stole my brother-in-law’s farm truck and it downloaded the contents of their phone, allowing law enforcement officers to trace the theft back to the theft.

The attendee at the workshop was most interested in facts and wondered how much time I spent researching everything I included in the novel.

Not as much as you think, though she thought I’d absorbed tons of material. You can spend as much time as you want in research, but it’s easy to disappear down a rabbit hole and waste valuable writing time.

We don’t have to become experts on automotive downloads, or as in the case of the second Tucker Snow, The Broken Truth, naturally occurring radioactive materials, or NORM, which comes from drilling for oil in west Texas. I stumbled across that interesting aspect of my story when we purchased land in Northeast Texas and found there were mildly radioactive drill rods on the property. Other than a discussion with an experienced NORM board member and a few minutes on the internet, that’s all I needed, except for imagination.

You can put too much information in a novel, to the point the pace slows and readers skip paragraphs or pages. Years ago, I got tired of reading Tom Clancy and Dale Brown, because I felt I was reading training manuals. All I need is a little info to make the story real and valid in a reader’s mind, and told the lady in class I collect just enough facts and anecdotes to make the story real.

In the case of my contemporary, traditional, and horror westerns, the history I include comes mostly from reading both fiction and nonfiction books on the old west. I read Larry McMutrty’s westerns of course, and all of Louis L’Amour’s novels. But more recent works helped shape the reality of West Texas, North Texas, and Eastern Oklahoma, in the case of The Journey South.

I gleaned details from Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne (nonfiction), Mike Blakely’s Comanche Dawn (fiction), and Buffalo Trail (fiction), by Jeff Guinn, and Comanche Midnight (nonfiction), by Stephen Harrigan, to name only a few. Within the past couple of weeks, I’ve collected more historical information from two fascinating books, The Beauty of the Days Gone By, Jason Stone (and I can’t recommend this excellent book enough!) and Charles Goodnight by J. Evers Haley.

Another workshop attendee mentioned my character backgrounds and wondered if I spent much time writing full biographies on those I create. The answer was no. They walk on at the right time, fully formed, and I discover their histories and backgrounds a little piece at a time as the plot progresses.

Think of it as meeting someone at a cocktail party, asking a few questions, and the listening as they reveal their own histories and backgrounds. However, we discussed those authors who prefer to create extensive biographies to further their understanding of the characters they’ve created. Either works, and both are effective!

Of course, the one writing rule I emphasized was that there’s no rules in writing, and they all wrote that down.