You don’t know what you don’t know.

  When I got Fangs and Family’s manuscript back with side notes and suggestions for improvement, I was stunned by how many words that were natural to me my Beta noted on the side with a brief definition. Given that she is a highly educated woman, how many more rare or specific terms did we miss?
  To give you an example: celeriac – a vegetable so popular in Poland you can find it in every sup and many salads is practically unknown over the pond. Geas – the term known in Europe also needed a hint of explanation because old magic terms are not so popular outside the Wiccan circle.
  Then you have Fin de siècle – a style in art and architecture that originated in 19th century France, well known to me because of the broad education we have in Poland (yeah, we may not know how to fill out the tax form, but ask me about Latin proverb, poetry of lady Murasaki, or epos of Gilgamesh and I can talk about it for ages).
  So I ended up putting footnotes on the words she highlighted and the ones that were purely Polish in origin because I’m not writing a dissertation for the university board, but entertaining vampire smut with ‘touching her and learn it is difficult to pick up knocked-out teeth with broken hands’.
  That was a valuable lesson for me to see the world through other person’s eyes and see how we are all beautifully different while we can still bond over smexy vampire hunk.