26. Getting It Wrong:

Getting It Wrong: A belated confession.

Forgive me Reader, it has been a long time since my last post…

Through this website contact’s page I have received a delightful drip-feed of positive feedback from the people that count, the readers. I try to respond to them all, so please do keep them coming. This said, some time ago one gave me pause. As well as praising If I Should Die, this reader also had a question…

I turned out they had identified a continuity error. I wish I could say it was something that had crept in during editing but the truth was, I’d made a mistake. It’s minor but it’s there. At the end of the book a character mentions taping off the BWM and searching around it for a particular piece of evidence – but it should’ve been the VW Golf. I got the cars mixed up. I can only apologise. The reader who contacted me was nice as pie about it.

At that point the book was in its first print run, and the subsequent re-prints and the E-Book were corrected, but the audiobook is stuck that way.

At first I felt gutted, my debut novel, culmination of years of work, stared accusingly from the shelf. But over time I’ve learned through other authors that I’m not alone. These things happen apparently. As the author, reading your chapters for the umpteenth time, it becomes all too easy to read what you think you’ve written and miss mistakes. With luck, your editors spot those that slip past you, but for all the times a book is read before publication, errors can escape notice.

As an architect, I know all too well that no project is ever quite completed to perfection and nothing niggles like that tiny detail that perhaps no one else will ever notice. Experience teaches that when the inner perfectionist strives and weeps, the philosopher must nod and move quietly on.