I was teaching at a high school and we had a unique student. The Year 9 boy (Freshman) was a genius and doing university Mathematics while staying with his age group. I happened to bump into him as he was leaving the math exam room and asked, “How did the paper go?” He looked distraught and replied, “Not too well. I think I lost two marks.” Sure enough, when the results came out he had a score of 98%. Rather than being thrilled with his result, he bemoaned the 2% he had got wrong. Some writers are like that – they worry about the 2% – the few mistakes that creep into a plot, or grammatical errors that they should’ve corrected. I’m coming to the sad conclusion that I’m like that. Every time I pick up MUTINY I can find room for improving the script. And, that’s what I’m doing right now – making small corrections, changing a POV or replacing repeated words, etc. before I send off for Kindle formatting. Will my care to correct or improve the manuscript make a difference? I doubt it, but I hope the book will be more readable and gain fewer critics. But, I’m worried that I must repeat this process again after a year or two. For example, MUTINY deals at some length with Artificial Intelligence. This rapidly changing field might result in some aspects of MUTINY becoming out-of-date. I read a news article today that reported an AI company who developed an agent that found flaws in all major software systems:
[Anthropic developed an AI model named Claude Mythos Preview (also referred to as “Mythos” or “Capybara” during development) which demonstrated the capability to autonomously discover thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across all major operating systems, web browsers, and critical software systems.]
I felt compelled to include this detail for my manuscript – it fitted the plot perfectly. Oh the joys of writing about such a fast-changing world. At least I have avoided political or military time-stamps that would date MUTINY, therefore keeping mistakes to 1%?