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The Snarky Editor often hears writers say things like, “Words are my thing, not math.” Though they don’t often say, “Words are my thing, not science,” perhaps they should.
… a second comet, even brighter than the first one, streaked overhead.
While comets often travel at very high speeds in real terms, the vast distance between them and an observer on earth means that comets more often appear to move very slowly. Often they’re visible in the night sky over a period of days. The author was probably picturing a meteor, which is a small section of a comet or an asteroid — a piece that broke away and entered earth’s atmosphere. Because they’re subject to much stronger earth gravity, meteors move very quickly — that’s why they’re sometimes called “shooting stars.” A meteor that lands on the ground, rather than burning up entirely in the atmosphere, is called a meteorite.
Carbon dioxide from a leaky space heater while ice fishing…
With every breath, we take in a mix of atmospheric gases, use the oxygen, and exhale the carbon dioxide. An air supply containing too much carbon dioxide is certainly not healthy for human beings, but in regular concentrations we breathe it all the time. These characters died from carbon monoxide — the product of incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. Carbon monoxide is odorless, tasteless, and colorless — making it extraordinarily dangerous when chimneys are plugged or gas-powered appliances, like space heaters, malfunction.
She could hear a car running and smelled the carbon monoxide.
Since carbon monoxide is odorless, what she smelled was the car’s exhaust — the mixture of fumes produced by an internal combustion engine. In a confined space, exhaust fumes can be anything from unpleasant to nauseating, but it’s the carbon monoxide lurking within the fumes, undetectable by the human nose, that is capable of killing.
Thunder boomed… We dropped flat, though no lightning followed.
Light travels faster than sound does, so lightning always appears first, followed by the thunder. An observer can count the seconds between seeing lightning and hearing thunder, then multiply by 1000 to get a very rough estimate of the distance in feet from where the lightning bolt struck. The author gets a bonus point, however, for spelling lightning correctly, rather than the fairly common error of calling it lightening.
I small almonds. Somebody put arsenic in your juice?
According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Most inorganic and organic arsenic compounds are white or colorless powders that do not evaporate. They have no smell, and most have no special taste.” Potassium cyanide, on the other hand, is often described — especially in mystery novels — as smelling like almonds. In fact, however, only about a third of the population can detect the bitter-almond smell of cyanide, while most people lack the sensors that would let them smell it.
The Snarky Editor comes out of hiding occasionally to comment on the awkward, silly, and sometimes hilarious editing errors found in published books.
#snarkyeditor #everybodyneedsaneditor
Leigh Michaels is the award-winning author of more than 100 books, including historical and contemporary romance, non-fiction books about writing, and local history. More than 35 million copies of her books are in print in 27 languages and more than 120 countries. She is also a writing coach and book editor, though she promises to be snarky only in regard to published books.
To find out more, check out https://leighmichaels.com
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