Things Fall Apart Meta: The perils of serialization

I'm not always sure how much I should write about the process of writing this series. I love reading other authors when they write about writing, but I wrestle with how much I should do it.

But, here, I'm going to do it, and show you a small peek behind the curtain.

Like a lot of serialized things—like our favorite TV series' from the last mumblety years—sometimes, things don't match up. Star Trek (1966) for example has more continuity problems than can be sanely counted. Even series that are intended to be planned out, like Babylon 5, aren't perfect.

I always thought that, if I sat down to really seriously write, I would be a planner, like B5's JMS. I had boundless respect for how he went in with a plan, knowing the plan would have to change, and managed to execute at least a reasonable slice of his plan despite the vicissitudes of the real world.

Turns out, in reality, I'm more of a pantser. I'm writing what I hope will turn out to be a coherent story, but, when distributing it as a serialized story, it means bright ideas I come up with later might not quite match up with things I've said before. If I was writing this solely as a novel, where the only person to see the chapters as they happened was my editor, maybe, or a small group of beta readers, that could be easily fixed before most people saw it.

But of course, I am serializing this, as well as working now on what I think of still as an "omnibus" rather than a novel. And in the process of reviewing chapters as I add them to the omnibus, I realized that I am right on the cusp of committing a continuity error.

At this point, I have two fairly obvious choices: abandon my clever idea, or retcon it, like I did with Singer's origins a while back. I've elected for the retcon. The element I'm retconning is actually small, and nothing else about the story to date rested on it, structurally, but the thing the retcon opens up will probably be more important going forward.

It's part of a general commitment that the "novel/omnibus" version of the early part of this story is going to weave more tightly with some elements that only got introduced later when writing it serially.

In general, the decision to start pulling together an omnibus makes all of you my beta readers. Y'all don't seem to mind very much, so it all works out.

I will not spoil the retcon, or the reason for it, here. You might have already guessed it, and that's fine. I'm only trying to be a little sneaky with it.

After the moment that requires the retcon has shown up, I'll tell you where to look for what I changed. Meanwhile, if your memory is good enough that you recognize the retcon immediately, and find yourself on the verge of saying "Wait a minute, in this chapter you said..." now you know that I already caught it!