{"id":10263,"date":"2012-03-19T17:26:47","date_gmt":"2012-03-19T21:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=10263"},"modified":"2012-03-19T17:26:47","modified_gmt":"2012-03-19T21:26:47","slug":"paying-attention-to-continuity-traps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/paying-attention-to-continuity-traps\/","title":{"rendered":"Paying Attention to Continuity Traps"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

[Found at Basic Instructions<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

[Warning to those of you who haven’t already read chapter 4 (“The Room”) in the <\/em>Propagational Library<\/a>\u00a0series: this post contains a spoiler or two.]<\/em><\/p>\n

As you may know, I’m sort of creating my\u00a0Propagational Library<\/em> series on the fly. Which means, among other things: failures —\u00a0things overlooked<\/em>\u00a0in the rush of creation and a quick follow-up editing pass —\u00a0will 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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/em>\u00a0and outside<\/em>\u00a0the 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:<\/p>\n