Have you ever started reading something and you think…hey, great book and THEN you read what the heroine is wearing and it takes you back to your youth and the days your mom wore a paisley caftan around the house? And that hero with the mullett…oh boy…blast from the past huh? Funny thing though. You aren’t reading a book from the 1970’s or 1980’s are you? You are reading a new release. I constantly have those WTF moments when reading something and it totally takes me out of the story. It is one of my biggie pet peeves. Nothing ages an author more than not doing her homework when setting the scene in a book.

It doesn’t have to be hair styles or fashions either. It can be the way the entire scene is set. Lava lamps and little touches are a-okay if the apartment you are describing belongs to a character who loves quirky little things here and there. Not a biggie. But when his/her ‘pad’ has Austin Powers place stamped all over it, you know you are reading something by an author who has her head stuck in the past. Imagine this, the hero brings the heroine to his place for a romantic dinner and a little seduction. In his pov he thinks, damn, she is so hot, so sexy, she looks like a rocker chick from an 80’s girl power band.
Or better yet, he thinks…I can’t want to get her out of smokin’ hot dress with the white pilgrim collar and the big cabbage roses all over it. Ummm Hmmmm what a smoldering hot temptress. I’m going to carry her across my shag carpet to my black satin-covered heart-shaped bed and screw the perm right out of her hair. She will run her fingers through that big wad of hair on the back of my head, too. It gets me hot just thinking out it.

This is one of my big writing/reading pet peeves. Everyone has them so it’s okay to bitch and whine about it here. I do it all the time. Let’s face it, we all have our pet peeves, those little detail things that take us right out of a story. What are some of yours?