The Pet Hut

This is the old Pizza Hut in my hometown. I took my oldest daughter and her friends here for her 12th birthday. It closed a few years ago and is currently vacant. (Maybe there are some animals inside, but I doubt they're dogs or cats.) I also volunteered briefly with the Forsyth County Humane Society. They were located in an old building that didn't have much room for the animals. Small kennels were stacked on top of larger kennels. To create the fictional Pet Hut, I drew inspiration from both of these locations.

A pup from the Humane Society. Her name was either Cupcake or Butter. I can't remember.

Another dog from the Humane Society. Her kennel sat on top of the larger-dog kennel. I don't recall her name. I just remembered she trembled a lot.

Mistakes

Ask anyone who knows me (or just check out my Twitter feed), I'm horrible with grammar and spelling and anything else I should have learned in 7th grade language arts. Thankfully, before a novel goes to print, a copy editor checks it over. These brilliant people keep us authors looking sharp. Barbara Bakowski was the beautiful brain behind TMLG. But no book is perfect. So far, I've found 1 minor mistake in this novel, and I'd like to explain what happened.

It was January 9, 2018. The book was ready to go to press. We'd done our final read through. It's was thumbs-up, green-light go time. The manuscript was ready to morph into a book. Then it was January 10, 2018, and my almost-9-year-old dog Pepper died. She'd had a series of major seizures. We'd rushed her to the emergency vet. She lasted about 48 hours--never regaining sight or her ability to stand--and then she went into cardiac arrest. We're not sure why this happened. She had no history of seizures, and seizures are not usually fatal. The vet suspect an undetected condition. She suggested perhaps Pepper had a brain tumor (!!!) that we were unaware of.

As you can imagine, I was devastated. We have three dogs, but Pepper was special. I called her my soulmate of dogs. She was never more than a few feet away from me. (Yes, even in the bathroom.) She was a puppy when my son was a 1-year-old toddler. They grew up together. Pepper, like my other 2 dogs, was mentioned in the acknowledgement section of the book. When we got home from saying our final goodbye to Pepper, I emailed my editor immediately. I NEEDED to change the acknowledgements. My dog-loving editor, Caroline, got the file back and changed it.

Here's the section from the book. Can you spot the mistake? It's not a grammar problem. It's a style issue.

Here it is: "for nearly nine years" should be "for nearly 9 years." All numbers in the book take the form of digits. Except in this 1 rushed paragraph. Oops.