Fun trivia I learned by writing Silver Circle

Okay, when I asked on Facebook how to keep the authorities from tracking your phone, I found out some interesting (but not necessarily fun) things about that, some of which made its way into Silver Circle #1. But today, I’d like to share some trivia that is both interesting AND fun that I have now learned about because of comments on SC #2.

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Did you know that it’s rather difficult to get a laptop that is wholly incapable of connecting to the internet? Probably you did. There’s an item called a Freewrite for which you have to specifically enable connection. It turns out that if you refer to a “Freewrite laptop” in your book, one-third of your readers (current proportion) will actually go to the trouble of looking it up and finding out ALL ABOUT its capabilities. I’m sorry I sent you down this rabbit hole, unless you enjoyed it, and then great, glad to give you a reason to dive into the world of unconnected devices.

I honestly didn’t realize anyone would look up the real thing. I have now created a new unconnectable device with a different name so that no one will look up the real thing and get distracted because the device in SC #2 isn’t the same as the real-world device.

However! Neat trivia coming up, provided by a reader who went down that rabbit hole:

Check this out: a programmer made the old and classic game Doom playable on … a … pregnancy test.

They had to replace the test’s original CPU and display, so it’s really only a shell. But it’s still an impressive feat — the game retains the original’s hypnotic movement and its iconic enemies are easy to make out.

That’s kind of amazing even to me, and I don’t know anything about the game.

A company called Clevo says they can make laptops for people that don’t connect to WiFi or Bluetooth. I guess that’s neat? I borrowed a variant of their name for a completely fictional laptop that does not exist in the real world, so please don’t go poking about looking for something with that name when you read the book. However, should you want something that can’t connect, apparently that’s a good company to look at.

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My favorite line from any early reader, so far, is Mike S referring to someone who’s been briefly kidnapped as “being brought into an unsolicited temporary alliance,” and I just wanted to share that with you because it’s funny.

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Did you know that very few homes in Las Vegas have basements? I did not know that. Supposing that you do want a basement beneath a home in Las Vegas? You can make that happen. It’s just that most people don’t. But, since you can do it if you’re determined, it’s basically fine.

I reluctantly decided that probably I’m not going to set any part of Silver Circle within a truly remarkable underground … basement isn’t the right term. Underground mansion beneath what appears to be an ordinary Las Vegas home.

Just off Las Vegas’ bustling Flamingo Road, surrounded by family homes, apartment complexes, and stores, an unassuming two-story house sits on top of what may be the city’s most peculiar home. … Some 25 feet beneath a typical Las-Vegas style yard of gravel and palms, … The sprawling 15,000+ square-foot artificial environment features 12-foot ceilings and skies with lighting to simulate sunrise, day, sunset, and night, as well as a swimming pool, putting green, and two spas. If that isn’t enough, there’s also a sauna, wet bar, dance floor, a barbecue grill, a billiard room, and seating for over 120 people. Since this is a fallout shelter, it also includes a generator, fire and smoke alarms, an intercom system, and large food storage pantries.

Up at ground level, the clues that something is different about the unassuming two-story house are the turbine vents in the yard and the odd sloped structure that houses the stairwell down to the underground lair. 

Amazing. There are reasons this isn’t really suitable as a setting, but I’m still tempted. However, one real use of this remarkable mansion/fallout shelter is that it establishes beyond any doubt that if you really want an extensive basement in Las Vegas, you can build one.

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A place called Ari’s Dry Cleaning (?) evidently serves amazingly good gelato, should you happen to be in San Diego and you’d like to try some gelato. I don’t have the patience to poke around on the linked website and figure out why a place that serves gelato is called “Dry Cleaning.” If anyone knows the story behind that, feel free to explain it.

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So, at this moment, seven people besides me have read Silver Circle #2. Of these seven, four have a knack for picking up typos. No one has specifically read it solely as a proofreader yet, except my mother, who is one of those four.

Here is an interesting tidbit of trivia: Each of those four early readers picked up a good many typos. ALL FOUR picked up around 90% unique typos. There is actually very little overlap. VERY little. Everyone caught it when I spelled “likely” as “likelyl” — that extra letter jumped off the page for everyone (including me, by the way). It’s weird I didn’t see it myself the instant I typed it, because, I mean, “likelyl”?

However, anything more subtle than that was probably overlooked by three out of four readers, meaning specifically readers with a knack for proofreading. This includes missing quote marks, inappropriate quote marks, missing periods, inappropriate commas or missing commas, and a great heap of missing words, plus a few wrong words.

A related bit of trivia: yesterday, a sharp-eyed reader drew my attention to four typos in TUYO — which has been out since 2020. Isn’t that remarkable? Three were inappropriate punctuation mistakes, I think, and one was a wrong word. All were obvious to me once this reader pointed to them.

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