tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1990338437877873686.post1827601625014759237..comments2024-03-28T22:01:11.059-04:00Comments on Murder is Everywhere: My biggest mistakeOvidia Yuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749549092493567689noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1990338437877873686.post-85716275143643520072015-03-19T06:22:31.178-04:002015-03-19T06:22:31.178-04:00Funnily enough we made a car mistake also. In Deat...Funnily enough we made a car mistake also. In Death of the Mantis, Kubu has problems with the petrol pump (at least he thinks it is the petrol pump) on his Land Rover in the Kalahari. One reader pointed out to us that the only Land Rovers of that type available in Botswana were diesels... Michael Sears (of Michael Stanley)https://www.blogger.com/profile/09886295534214542834noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1990338437877873686.post-18696052064212232842015-03-18T17:34:42.431-04:002015-03-18T17:34:42.431-04:00Hi Jørn. Great post. And hey, you want car stuff, ...Hi Jørn. Great post. And hey, you want car stuff, drop me a line. I spent the best part of 25 years as a motoring photojournalist. It's come in very useful at times.<br /><br />I once managed to include a nine-day week in one of my books, but fortunately an eagle-eyed copy editor spotted it before it went to print. Now I keep a note of over which days the events of the book take place, just in case. Plenty of other errors, but I do my best to correct them in later editions ...Zoë Sharphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14065427744062846167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1990338437877873686.post-10148507563751226782015-03-18T16:16:33.807-04:002015-03-18T16:16:33.807-04:00Jørn, there's a big one sitting out there that...Jørn, there's a big one sitting out there that no one's picked up on yet--and I'm not about to announce it--but if the day of reckoning ever comes I have my answer all ready. "The character was lying."<br /><br />After all, you can only blame the line editor so many times. :)Jeffrey Sigerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00718317707555064653noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1990338437877873686.post-8070510847162144052015-03-18T11:15:58.480-04:002015-03-18T11:15:58.480-04:00My biggest mistake was in my first novel, City of ...My biggest mistake was in my first novel, City of Silver, which takes place in Potosi, in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru in 1650. The 17th century pSanish city is still up there at 13,500 feet on the Altiplano of Bolivia. I had been there before I wrote about it. As you can imagine, it is pretty cold up there. I visited there with my claustrophobic husband, so we did not take a tour into the silver mine. In the first scene of the book, an Indian miner goes into the mine to retrieve a package he had hidden there. He feels cold as he descends. (I was always feeling cold in the town. Basements are cold. Caves in the US are cold. It made sense that Santiago Yana would find the mine cold.) But my assumption was WRONG. The deeper one goes into that mine, the hotter it is.<br />One reader knew I was wrong. She had been to Potosi and into that mine. Fortunately for me, she told me that privately, and did not announce it to the audience at the library where we met. She was so delighted that someone had written a story about the city's history, she didn't care if I got that wrong.<br />I love the idea of announcing that one puts in a factual error on purpose. With historical novels there is so much to know that I must have made a lot of mistakes. I need a place to hide. That excuse could very well be it.Annamaria Alfierihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12311596277267789834noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1990338437877873686.post-37394362512241386662015-03-18T09:51:47.963-04:002015-03-18T09:51:47.963-04:00Of course there are mistakes in every novel. A no...Of course there are mistakes in every novel. A novel is such a large and complex thing that...<br /><br />Let me draw an analogy to computer programming, which is what I've done professionally all of my ...er... professional life. :-) Before I'd become a professional programmer, while working at Hewlett-Packard as a lowly production worker, I walked past an engineer's desk one day and noticed one of those little sign cards that have humorous and philosophical sayings. This one read, "There is no such thing as a non-trivial bug-free program." In essence, a program can be so simple that it CAN be bug free, but once it reaches a certain level of complexity, to be non-trivial, it WILL have one or more bugs in it. Granted, this was written over 35 years ago, and computer 'science' has progressed greatly since then, but then so has the complexity of the programs.<br /><br />Writing a novel and writing a complex computer program share many similarities and suffer from the same "non-trivial bug-free" problem. The human mind simply can't grasp and hold all of the information and data and structures necessary in such a complex endeavor and do it without making mistakes.<br /><br />So it is in life, so it is in novels. Let your novel live! (Do the best you can, then to hell with the nit-pickers. :-) Life's too short.<br />Everett Kaserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12371555243187874414noreply@blogger.com