How Does That Happen?: Obvious Errors

I was reading a really great book the other day. (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford.) Seriously, a great story based around the Japanese internment during WWII, teenage love, culture, family, and so much more. The problem was… one small little thing. It is 1984 and the main character’s grown son (just finishing college) decides to track down his dad’s long-long love. Great! However, he uses his computer. Really? Commodores who still needed bootstrapping back then could find someone who has been lost for, what, 40 years? Wow. And the thing was that everyone in my book club noticed this. How does this happen? This manuscript went through the author’s edits (and maybe even a critique group), his agent, his publishing editor, and maybe even some family members. How did this not get caught? Was this a last minute change and everyone forgot that ‘current’ time in the novel was actually 1984? Or was ‘current’ time actually 1994 and then at the last minute got changed to 1984 and this once-correct fact slipped by?

Why do I bring this up? Because weeks later… it still scares me. It is one tiny thing, but it can throw the whole novel and all the painstaking research into question. I trust that the rest of the novel is accurate–because it rocks and feels so very real–but the fact that one slip up can carry through… well, as a writer I know it is just a matter of time before I make a mistake like that. In fact, I know I will because I have already caught mistakes that I have unwittingly made. How can we not? I’m simply lucky in that they haven’t been published. (Who’d a thunk I’d be referring to my unpublished status as lucky, eh?)

Do you have a ‘big fear’ when it comes to your writing?