Where Are Your Blind Spots?

 A couple months ago when I was putting together the Tales of the Scarlet Knight 10th Anniversary Bundle, I saw this fairly nasty review of Book 7 again:

I give up. I managed, over the past three days, to read the first seven books in this ongoing series, but now I quit.

On the positive side, the series is imaginative, an easy read, and reasonably well plotted (and without the purposeless sex scenes too many indie fantasies throw in just to attract a certain group of readers-- not that there's no sex, but it doesn't show up in lurid detail, every half-dozen pages, whether it benefits the plot or not). Again on the positive side, there are remarkably few typos, in a genre rife with them.

That said, there are some major problems in the writing, and as I wrote, I finally hit my limit. It wasn't just that P.T. Dilloway cannot tell the difference between a subject pronoun and one serving as a direct/indirect object-- lots of folk can't, and I'm therefore not going to condemn the writing merely for that. No, it's other things: things so comic that I at first thought were meant that the books were supposed to be spoofs of the genre. An ongoing example is that of on of the villains of the series, an evil 'crime boss' named "Don Vendetta". Not only is the crime 'Don's' name Vendetta, which is an Italian noun meaning "revenge feud" (and not an Italian name at all), but then it turns out the the Don is actually female, and thus the title would actually be Donna and not Don. Although I winced each time I read it after I figured out it wasn't supposed to be a joke, again, lots of folk don't know much about either Italian or Italians, and lots of indie authors don't do a lot of research. I was willing to let that slide, too.

But then I figured out that Mr. Dilloway is convinced that it is the city council, and not the school board, that makes budgeting decisions for the schools in American cities, and worse, that police cars have red and blue sirens (and in one of the installments we learn that the city workers have yellow sirens). Sirens, last I checked, made noise; it's flashing emergency lights that come in red and blue or yellow. Once could be an editing error; on the third or fourth time it became clear that he didn't know the difference between lights and sirens. An author that is going to set his story around law enforcement in the modern world (albeit in a fictionalized American city) should at least have some knowledge of his subject-- failing that, he should write 'swords & sorcery', where he's allowed to make everything up as he pleases.

And the I found, at the end of the seventh installment in the series, that even that wouldn't have been good enough. When Mr. Dilloway wrote that 'two police officers were sitting between a woman', instead of the other way around, I knew that I couldn't bear to read any more... I was done. Too bad.

(First, I'm a little skeptical that this person could actually read the first "seven" books in 3 days.  Since this is book 7 maybe they're counting the Dark Origins prequel?  Still, it seems kinda fishy because while book 0 and book 1 are fairly short they get longer from there.  But there's no way to prove it, is there?)

I actually can't argue with some of it.  I just don't think it was that serious to act like such a dick and stop reading.  (Not to mention of course this person ONLY gave a review to the one book he didn't like, not to any he did like.  People who do that suck.)

The "Don Vendetta" thing he could have just read this blog in 2012 and would have known it's not that I don't know what Vendetta means or that Don is the masculine form.  The city council thing I just half-assed and so after this review, I took like ten minutes to change it.  The point wasn't the subject of the meeting; it's what happened to Becky at the meeting.  So, not really a reason to quit reading a book.  I mean as I've said before, I've read a Pulitzer-winning book with factual errors and I didn't drop it--and obviously neither did the people who vote for Pulitzers.

It's really the "siren" thing I wanted to talk about.  For whatever reason I just always thought of the lights as "sirens."  I guess because on TV the lights and sound are usually together, so I just lumped them together in my brain.

It's a blind spot, something I just didn't realize I was thinking wrong about until someone pointed it out.  It reminded me of the British series The IT Crowd where in an episode the office manager says she doesn't want to be "put on a pedal stool" instead of "put on a pedestal."  One of the computer nerds mocks her but then he says "damp squid" instead of "damp squib," which I guess is some kind of expression in the UK.

The point being that everyone has one (or many more) blind spots.  No one is perfect.

And the reason I mention this is two-fold:

1. We should really try not to be so dickish when someone makes a mistake.  Because everyone makes mistakes.  Everyone has a blind spot they don't realize until it's too late.  Gleefully pointing this out or ranting about how stupid the author is makes you seem like an asshole.  But unfortunately the Internet makes that pretty common.  And yes, I know I do it too.
2. As writers, it's always good if you can get some other trusted person to read your manuscript before you publish it.  Maybe you don't need to spend $2000 on an editor, but at least get someone to look at it first.  If I had such a person, he or she might have noticed my blind spot and pointed it out before some dick ranted for paragraphs about it.  In turn maybe you can read someone else's rough draft and notice their blind spots.

We're all in this together, right?  So, what blind spots have people pointed out to you?