Teenage girls don't go to the mall without their purses.
The problem is, in the first two chapters of Perilous, I have four teenage girls at the mall. None of them have purses on them. How on earth did I not catch this before?
I was one of those unfortunate teenagers that always seemed to be a step behind my peers. Maybe because my parents weren't very materialistic in the fashion sense. We didn't watch TV, listen to radio, or have magazines. So I just wasn't aware of what the next fashionable item was until everyone else at school already had it.
In junior high, everyone had one of those giant binders. The vinyl kind that held seven different folders, a pencil case, and velcroed shut.
By the time I got myself one of those cool binders, everyone had abandoned them in favor of backpacks. Backpacks??? My mom said she wasn't buying me a backpack since my binder still worked fine. Good thing, too. Because one day in ninth grade, I come to school to discover that the backpacks are gone. Three of my friends are sporting the exact same brown leather purse. Lockers are being used again, with only one folder being brought to each class.
By the end of the week, all of my friends had this brown purse.
Of course, I wanted one.
My mom fished around in her closet and found--this.
An authentic Guatemalan handbag.
My friends did not think it was cool. Neither did I. But it was my purse. And a teenage girl cannot go anywhere without her purse.
Luckily, this is easily fixed in my story. I just need to write in some purses.
And oh--about a year later, I got a brown purse that looked very much like the ones that had been in style the previous year. Still have it, somewhere.
