Nothing annoys a perfectionist more than the thing that is off; like\u00a0a crooked picture hanging on the wall or a\u00a0typo in the menu at a restaurant. Far worse than that are facing one’s own typos! So when a\u00a0reader pointed out that I had a “chicken coup” instead of a “chicken coop”\u00a0rise up as early as\u00a0the prologue, I cringed. Nonetheless, it conjured images of chickens flapping about, hysterically\u00a0trying to overthrow their keeper\u00a0and author, feathers flying everywhere. We had a good laugh over it. Another exercise in not taking oneself too, too seriously.<\/p>\n
No sooner had I gotten over that one, another two readers (independent of one another) pointed out that in Chapter 7, the\u00a0line “to get Santi’s goad,” should have actually read “goat” as opposed to “goad”. When I wrote it, I was thinking goad as in “to provoke”, “to annoy” or “to poke at with a cattle prod”. Even though I had always heard the expression, I couldn’t fathom why there would be a goat involved. One of my kind readers took the trouble to look up the origin of this esoteric idiom. It turns out, according to a posting in The Chronicle of the Horse, that goats were kept as companions for\u00a0racehorses to keep the horse calm. However, if the goat were stolen or misappropriated, both the horse and its owner would get extremely upset. Hence, the origin of the expression and its subsequent use to describe making someone angry.<\/p>\n
I stand corrected on that count, and for any other errata that might appear in the hardcover version of House Key. Any errors are mine.\u00a0Ironically, and\u00a0in fairness to my editors, I probably introduced them in the process of making corrections to the final version of the manuscript. These will be corrected in the Kindle and any future versions of House Key. For now, we’ll\u00a0consider\u00a0the remaining volumes of the first hardcover edition collector’s items.<\/p>\n
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