Harry's B-day Re: Riddle and Grindelwald in 1945

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 109671

> RMM:
> I have a question then. 
> Has anyone here had a book published?
> Does anyone here know that the book publisher has people called 
> "editors" that go over the book for exactly these kinds of 
> discrepancies?
> 
> So, unless the editors are a bunch of bumble brains, they would be 
> telling Jo:  "You have some dates wrong here.  Fix them or we will."
> 
> But yet, the dates stay in the book the way they are.  Why?
> 
> For only one reason: Because the DATES are NOT WRONG.  It is how we 
> are misreading them.  (I exclude the last book because they put the 
> dates in wrong to make a point about our lack of being able to
> discern 
> what is being said.)

Carol responds:
Speaking as an editor, let me first say that we're people, too,
sometimes pressed to meet a deadline and certainly subject to error.
Second, it's possible that different editors have worked on the
different books and would not spot a discrepancy between two books, or
maybe even a discrepancy between two chapters in the same book. We
might query an apparent discrepancy, for example, "Wasn't Miss Fawcett
in Ravenclaw, not Hufflepuff, earlier?" but we can't go hunting
through all the chapters to find that earlier reference.

As for errors regarding dates, one book clearly states that Nearly
Headless Nick hasn't eaten in 400 years; another celebrates his 500th
"deathday." Unless he ate during his first 100 years as a ghost but
can no longer do so, one of those dates has to be wrong.

JKR, like everyone else, is capable of error. So are her editors.
There's no need to be so adamant about the dates, especially given her
known (and admitted) weakness in math (or "maths," as she would say).

Carol, who *has* had some books and articles published (most recently
some articles about the friends of Percy Shelley in the New Dictionary
of National Biography) and who edits for a living