It’s Tuesday, April Fool’s Day, and a very quiet opening day for Overkill. I’m at home instead of being on tour. The first official event won’t be until Sunday afternoon.

I’ve made breakfast and gotten my steps–mostly inside steps these days, but they still count. Now I’m writing the blog. Pretty soon it’ll be time to fix dinner. So rather than leading some kind of over-the-top, glamorous, best-selling author life, I’m really pretty damned ordinary. That’s as it should be, and I’m happy to be so. Now, onto the blog.

In the nineties Bill and I went to Germany to take European delivery of his Porsche Boxster. One of the benefits of doing that included a factory visit. I didn’t look forward to that with a whole lot of interest, but it turned out to be fascinating. They operated under a supply system called JIT—Just In Time inventory. Every forty-five minutes or so a box truck would arrive at the factory loaded with the parts needed by mechanics for the following hour’s worth of work. Said parts were then delivered to each mechanic’s individual work station. Once the mechanic finished his part of the job, he was required to sign off on it. If that part of the vehicle failed during in-house testing, he was the one required to fix whatever was wrong.

Why bring up that piece of ancient history? Last night I lay awake for the better part of two hours, wondering what in the world would be the topic for this week’s blog. This morning, my JIT subject matter was right here waiting for me, sitting in my morning’s worth of email.

In the old days, Terry House, my top-drawer fan in Grand Junction, Colorado, would have her Audible copy of the new book drop at midnight. By the time I crawled out of bed the next morning, she would have already finished reading the book and have an email with her comments sitting in my email inbox. Terry passed away a number of months ago, so this time my first-responder is Ben from Green Valley. He just finished his reading of Overkill. One of the things that he enjoyed about it is the fact that many of the fictional names in the book coincide with names from his own life.

I’m sad to have to admit that there’s a glaring error in this book, something discovered by one of my wonderful first-day readers. Now that I’ve mentioned the existence of said error, I have no doubt that all my SERs (Sharp-eyed Readers) will go searching for same, and no doubt they’ll succeed in finding it. I’ve just submitted a correction for that to my editor in New York. The fix won’t be in current printings of Overkill, but it will appear in subsequent ones.

That’s one of the very real hazards of writing more than sixty books, especially series books, over the course of forty years. It’s hard to remember every detail of the histories of all those individual characters. Remember that time in Payment in Kind when Beau had a passing thought—30 words worth—about his not serving during the Vietnam War? Years later, when his service in Vietnam was front and center in Second Watch, several readers let me have it on that score, too. You’ll find that in current editions of that book, rather than the battered original paperback ones, that passing thought has been edited out and vanished.

So let’s be clear. This is NOT a complaint. I’m grateful to have fans who care enough to let me know when I’ve screwed up. But once again, I’ll take comfort in what I learned on the reservation—that every piece of art, regardless of what kind it may be, must have at least one error in it, because only the Great Spirit is perfect.

Believe me, I’m anything but!

By the way, I’ve recently been informed that the Amish also believe in the necessity of imperfection in artwork.