[Found at Basic Instructions]

[Warning to those of you who haven’t already read chapter 4 (“The Room”) in the Propagational Library series: this post contains a spoiler or two.]

As you may know, I’m sort of creating my Propagational Library series on the fly. Which means, among other things: failures — things overlooked in the rush of creation and a quick follow-up editing pass — will be immediately obvious to a dispassionate reader. While working on Saturday’s installment, which involves the effects of a weird high-tech chamber upon a person sitting within, I had what struck me as a cool idea. This is captured in the following passage:

Dolly Burghar, nee Magaziner, sat down on a vinyl-covered stool inside a steel-toothed box… Her husband Matthew flipped a switch, turned a knob, whatever. Two minutes later, the steel box was empty.

Cool! The lady vanishes! But this cool idea presented me with a problem (unseen at the time). Later in the same installment, my protagonist, Gabriel Naude, had to undergo a brief demonstration of the box (which he calls “the room,” in quotes). Even though it was a scaled-down, non-full-power demonstration, I could not afford for him to vanish. Because even later, in an upcoming chapter, he will need to be both inside and outside the box, simultaneously, during a full-scale, sustained use of “the room.” Fixing my problem will involve one and/or two courses of action, when and if I turn this into a real honest-to-gods (and hypothetically) publishable story:

• I can tinker with the “Dolly Burghar Magaziner” scene, so that she doesn’t disappear (probably by having her “just” die); OR
• I can figure out some alternative to the later planned scene, with Gabe and Gabe-Prime (let’s call him), so that the one inside the box also disappears.

(From another perspective, you may observe, both of these are Band-Aids — attacking symptoms rather than underlying causes. If I made up my mind to outline the entire story at once, or at least the next few chapters in advance, then possibly I could avoid such lapses. Practically speaking, the likelihood of such a decision on my part approaches zero.)

I’m thinking of this little glitch as evidence of more than just a continuity mistake. It’s a continuity trap: getting snagged on, and dazzled by, some shiny little detail thrown into the pathway by one’s devious subconscious — sufficiently snagged that I lost the thread of what had to happen. It’s like suddenly finding yourself in a room of your home and wondering how you got there… then looking down to see you’ve got an unrecognized ball of aluminum foil crumpled up in your hand. You want to go, Wait wait wait WAIT a damned minute! and start the last three minutes all over again.

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P.S. After writing the above, I searched for “continuity trap” to see if I’d invented a new phrase. Fat chance! E.g., this (on continuity traps in film shots). Or this (on continuity traps in comics). Etc., etc.