the book log...what is it?...it's this and that...

THE INCREDIBLE CHANGING SURNAME

My daughter was glancing through the first pages of BOMBER BOYS and immediately spotted an embarrassing mistake that has somehow slipped through the net to appear in the finished book. I can’t think how I missed it! This particular error involves the name of a character, discussed in the opening paragraphs, which changes miraculously from Smith to Jones within the space of a few lines! I fear my daughter won’t be the only one to notice this…

I do find myself changing characters’ names from time to time, for one reason or another. But it is a practise fraught with difficulty, as the above example illustrates. It is very hard to “see” where the old name persists in the text. The “Find” and “Replace” commands on my PC are helpful. But that didn’t seem to help me with BOMBER BOYS. The character in question is already dead at the beginning of the story, and he plays no part in the subsequent action. I wasn’t expecting any trouble from him. Yet now his name(s) will haunt me. I'll probably suffer a faint flush of embarrassment every time I think about the error. This is one of the reasons I avoid reading my books after they’ve been published. It’s too late to change anything by then.