Everyone Makes Mistakes!

Just had an email from Paul Thornley who will be doing the audio version of Nightfall for Isis Publishing. He is trying to get a feel for the accent that Nightingale should have. He points out that in the book Nightingale was born and brought up in Manchester but that his parents are buried in a graveyard in east London so was asking when the family had moved south.

Whoops! What happened is that in the book originally the Nightingales lived in London and Nightingale and his father supported Arsenal. During the rewriting I moved them to Manchester, mainly so that Nightingale had a reason for losing touch with his aunt and uncle. I switched the football team but left the parents buried in London, and really there is no way to explain that, especially with the vicar telling Nightingale that they had been regular churchgoers and he knew them well. As the last memory he has of them is them standing at the house in Manchester waving him off to university, so obviously they must still have been living there.

It is an error but I think it is an easy fix. It’s on P122. At the moment we have:


Nightingale hadn’t lied when he’d told Jenny McLean that he wasn’t going to drive. And he’d meant what he’d said about wanting some fresh air, even though the first thing he’d done after he’d left the wine bar was to light a cigarette. Neither had he been lying when he’d told the girl in the shop doorway that he didn’t know where he was going. So far as he was concerned, he was doing just as he’d said he would: taking a walk while he collected his thoughts. But his subconscious had other plans for him. It took him to his car and thirty minutes later he was driving through east London and ten minutes after that he was parking outside the graveyard where his parents were buried, lighting another cigarette and wondering why he had never visited their graves since the day of the funeral.

I think all we have to change is a couple of words:

Nightingale hadn’t lied when he’d told Jenny McLean that he wasn’t going to drive. And he’d meant what he’d said about wanting some fresh air, even though the first thing he’d done after he’d left the wine bar was to light a cigarette. Neither had he been lying when he’d told the girl in the shop doorway that he didn’t know where he was going. So far as he was concerned, he was doing just as he’d said he would: taking a walk while he collected his thoughts. But his subconscious had other plans for him. It took him to his car and three hours later he was driving through Manchester and ten minutes after that he was parking outside the graveyard where his parents were buried, lighting another cigarette and wondering why he had never visited their graves since the day of the funeral.

The only stretch is that he’s driven for three hours on auto-pilot but I think we can buy that as he has a lot to think about! Better to fix it that way than to try to explain why they are buried in London when they lived in Manchester!

It just goes to show that everyone makes mistakes! And a big thank you to Paul for pointing that one out – the book had gone through five or six edits without anyone else spotting it!