I decided to re-read Trang, just to get myself geared up for the fourth book, and…whoopsie. Yeah. In the first book the layout of the diplomatic station isn’t especially important, and in the second book it’s only a little more important. But in the third book the station layout is HUGELY important. Meaning that I actually drew myself a detailed station layout for the first time for the third book, only to realize now that it contradicts some information in the first book.

I’m re-reading the second book now, just to see where the issue stands. I’ll give the third book another read as well. If the first and third book are the problems, then the choices are to fix either the third book or the first. The third book hasn’t gone to the copy editor yet (still waiting), so hopefully I can just take care of it easily in that book without having it mess up the plot (that will be what the additional read will be looking for). If it’s really not fixable in that book, then it’s going back to the first book, fixing that (plus the two typos I found)—but I wouldn’t bother to fix the paper version (I don’t even know if I can at this point, since I’m not using the same software), and of course anyone who got the e-book before I fixed it would still have an inconsistent copy.

Obviously this problem would have been avoided if I had done a detailed layout of the station at the outset, but I feel like that could have created problems, too. I do plan my books to an extent, but I don’t know what exactly is going to happen in each book until I write it. And this issue was caused by my being overly precise in the first book when it wasn’t essential to the plot, so that’s kind of annoying.