Sunday Thread: The Mistakes that Stuck

Hi friends.

Greetings from New Brunswick, where I gave a brand-new-for-the-first-time talk yesterday to a room of gorgeous and curious people. It was pleasant to be up north for a few days where it’s nice and cool. It was also really lovely to see my old friend Roxane Gay, and to watch her do her thing for a minute with a crowd. If you ever get a chance to see her speak, I highly recommend it.

OK, here’s a juicy subject for you that I can’t just shake this Sunday morning.

A few weeks ago I sent someone the galley of my new novel and then they read it and sent me a nice email about it. At the very end of that email, in a casual p.s., they mentioned a factual error embedded in a line of dialogue that I had just somehow missed, as had the copy editor, even though we had rigorously edited that book.

I sent a frantic email to my publisher. Would we be able to fix it in the first printing?

I made my peace with it: if it had to remain, it had to remain. But I still held my breath as I sent them a new line of dialogue as a fix.