iTunes shuffles from Audioslave’s The Original Fire to Perry Como’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas. Yes, that is a bit of a musical jolt, but I kept right on listening and crooning along with Perry…and mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again…

Oops. I know it’s September, but you just wait. Mark my words. At the end of the month you’ll get a jolt of jolly when you walk into Wal-Mart, K-mart or Mart-mart and find all the Christmas crap is out. But before that happens I am reminded of a conversation I  had with Swell and katydidinoz.livejournal.com. It seems nothing will yank her out a story like anachronistic writing. Say she’s reading a romance set in a particular era, like 1880. If, as she’s reading, she comes across a word like moron, which did not enter the common lexicon until the 1920s, blammo, she’s back in 2010.

Me, I could care less if the author chose an pre-era word or put the heroine in bloomers instead of pantaloons. My jolt-o-meter gives me a kick in the arse when I slam into a typo like the Bradly Bunch or if a major character’s name is different to the name on the back cover blurb (as with my reissue copy of Jenny Crusie’s What The Lady Wants). Sloppiness like that annoys me, but it doesn’t put me off reading the rest of the book, nor does it prevent me from enjoying the story. A shitty story is what puts me off reading the rest of the book.

So what does it for you? What gives you a big-assed Perry Como jolt? Is it the End-of-September-Christmas-Cheer, Starsky & Dutch, or finding a moron in your Handsome Cab?

And yes, you Anachonist-i-chrons, I KNOW it’s Hansom.