{"id":3263,"date":"2025-04-04T06:05:21","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T13:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=3263"},"modified":"2025-04-03T18:15:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T01:15:10","slug":"a-mixed-bag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2025\/04\/04\/a-mixed-bag\/","title":{"rendered":"A Mixed Bag"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Tuesday, April Fool\u2019s Day, and a very quiet opening day for Overkill<\/em>. I\u2019m at home instead of being on tour. The first official event won\u2019t be until Sunday afternoon.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve made breakfast and gotten my steps–mostly inside steps these days, but they still count. Now I\u2019m 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\u2019m really pretty damned ordinary. That\u2019s as it should be, and I\u2019m happy to be so. Now, onto the blog.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2014Just 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s worth of email.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sad to have to admit that there\u2019s a glaring error in this book, something discovered by one of my wonderful first-day readers. Now that I\u2019ve 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\u2019ll succeed in finding it. I\u2019ve just submitted a correction for that to my editor in New York. The fix won\u2019t be in current printings of Overkill<\/em>, but it will appear in subsequent ones. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of the very real hazards of writing more than sixty books, especially series books, over the course of forty years. It\u2019s hard to remember every detail of the histories of all those individual characters. Remember that time in Payment in Kind<\/em> when Beau had a passing thought\u201430 words worth\u2014about his not serving during the Vietnam War? Years later, when his service in Vietnam was front and center in Second Watch<\/em>, several readers let me have it on that score, too. You\u2019ll find that in current editions of that book, rather than the battered original paperback ones, that passing thought has been edited out and vanished.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s be clear. This is NOT a complaint. I\u2019m grateful to have fans who care enough to let me know when I\u2019ve screwed up. But once again, I\u2019ll take comfort in what I learned on the reservation\u2014that 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. <\/p>\n

Believe me, I\u2019m anything but!<\/p>\n

By the way, I\u2019ve recently been informed that the Amish also believe in the necessity of imperfection in artwork.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Tuesday, April Fool\u2019s Day, and a very quiet opening day for Overkill. I\u2019m at home instead of being on tour. The first official event won\u2019t be until Sunday afternoon. I\u2019ve made breakfast and gotten my steps–mostly inside steps these days, but they still count. Now I\u2019m writing the blog. Pretty soon it’ll be time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-tour-2","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-QD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3264,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3263\/revisions\/3264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}