When You Can Put a fire out with Ale, the Devil is in the Details
A PSA To Editors
Fun Fact: Ale is a variant of Beer
Fun Fact 2: The alcohol content in ale and beer is not high enough to be flammable.
But do you know what is highly flammable? My intolerance for all those details that the author just should have picked up. The details that the editor should have picked up. So why, dozens of proofreads and edits down the line, are we the ones who have to deal with the spelling mistakes, a plane flying over the Coliseum during a gladiator battle, a car ambling through Middle Earth, and (so I hear) a Starbucks cup on the Games of Thrones table?
Quite frankly: Why did the protagonist just put out a fire with a barrel of alcohol.
I am not one to call out books by name, but suffice it to say that to me, in a book supposed to hint to the occult, the only Devil I saw was in the details.
Yes it was a barrel of ale, and yes I now know that ale is capable of putting out a fire (albeit with a minor possibility of explosions), but that little detail took this whiskey-lover all the way out of the story and back to my bookshelf.
I never did finish that book.
Oh, I could have gotten past the amateurish attempts at horror, the underwhelming inciting incident, and the fact that a man pelted with rocks and stones was only chivalric and not at all winded. Yet, one little detail is enough to lay waste to all the author has built.
Please edit. It saves worlds.
Fun Fact 2: The alcohol content in ale and beer is not high enough to be flammable.
But do you know what is highly flammable? My intolerance for all those details that the author just should have picked up. The details that the editor should have picked up. So why, dozens of proofreads and edits down the line, are we the ones who have to deal with the spelling mistakes, a plane flying over the Coliseum during a gladiator battle, a car ambling through Middle Earth, and (so I hear) a Starbucks cup on the Games of Thrones table?
Quite frankly: Why did the protagonist just put out a fire with a barrel of alcohol.
I am not one to call out books by name, but suffice it to say that to me, in a book supposed to hint to the occult, the only Devil I saw was in the details.
Yes it was a barrel of ale, and yes I now know that ale is capable of putting out a fire (albeit with a minor possibility of explosions), but that little detail took this whiskey-lover all the way out of the story and back to my bookshelf.
I never did finish that book.
Oh, I could have gotten past the amateurish attempts at horror, the underwhelming inciting incident, and the fact that a man pelted with rocks and stones was only chivalric and not at all winded. Yet, one little detail is enough to lay waste to all the author has built.
Please edit. It saves worlds.
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