One final James Bond car post and then I'll find something else to talk about. I promise.
When I wrote In the Midnight Hour, I gave Ryne (my heroine) keyless entry. In my mind (and in the scene), she opened the doors to her vehicle by pressing the button on her key fob. As I proofread a test print of the book, everything was fine. Then, months later, I got my author copies. My keyless entry had been changed to keys entry.
This bugged me. A lot. It still bugs me.
My guess, and this is only a guess, is that whoever did the proofread of the galleys for the publisher lives in New York City and doesn't own a car. I can't see how else that would have been changed. The thing that's so frustrating is that at the time I didn't have that feature on my SUV and I had to research to find out that keyless entry was called keyless entry.
Fast forward to my James Bond car. Can you imagine if I wrote a character with a car like this? One that responds to voice commands, automatically hooks my cell phone into the system as soon as I get in the car, and has a remote start? I can't help but wonder what these features would be changed to. :-)
Let me close by saying I love copy editors and I've been lucky to have really good ones on all my books. I'm grateful for all the mistakes they find and fix.
