When You Make A Book Boo-Boo, They Always Find It

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A lot of work went into my book. A lot.

Writing. Rewriting. Editing. Rewriting again. Lather, rinse repeat. Then on to my editors, and more rewriting. Spellchecking, of course. Grammar, of course. Continuity – oh, you betcha!

Then on to proofing for a fresh set of eyes to catch every typo or slip in tense. They got nearly everything. (One little typo came through but it’s barely noticeable).

And then a reader pointed out my big ole idiot of a boo-boo.

Ugh.

Here’s the thing: I’m a single mom who can’t afford a ton of cutting edge technology for my kids. And I’m not a gamer. Neither is my daughter, really – she plays games on her phone but never got into gaming consoles much.

The gamer of the house is my son, and he is absolutely nuts about Mario Kart. So I wrote the character of Danny (who is based on my son, also a person with autism) and had him playing Mario Kart.

Here’s where I screwed up. Our gaming system is a Wii. Not a Wii U. A Wii. It’s seven years old – which is antique by technology standards – and we can barely find games for it anymore, but it still works and my kid uses it all the time. At his Dad’s house, he has an X-Box. But with me, it’s the Wii.

When I started working on edits for the book, I was afraid that having a character gaming on a Wii would make it seem dated, since the Wii is pretty much a dinosaur in gaming technology now. So I did a find and replace and subbed in “X-Box” everywhere it said “Wii.”

Easy-peasy. And now the character of Danny plays Mario Kart on his X-Box! Yay!

Yeah, I’m an idiot.

Mario Kart is, of course, exclusively Nintendo property. You can’t play it on X-Box. I should have inserted Playstation or PS2 or something. It didn’t even occur to me, even though I know that. With all the other edits going on, it wasn’t even a thought because it’s really not integral to the story in any way.

But it sure does irk a reader (who’s also a gamer) to read it, and understandably so.

Mea culpa, my readers. I promise, I’ll do better next time.