I was rereading THE MERCY MAKERS last week and discovered a small, barely there, unimportant detail that I absolutely forgot while working on THE SHAPE OF MONSTERS that…is now a wee plot hole because of a slight contradictory detail in said sequel. It’s not a big deal, and I’m sure if it turned into a big deal I could world-build my way out of this tiny hole. It’s so tiny I could probably put the paragraph from MERCY in which the inconsistency occurs here and most readers wouldn’t realize it was such because the contradiction in SHAPE isn’t stated explicitly enough that it even counts as a rule.

But regardless, this little hole doesn’t matter, and at the same time I’m obsessing over it.

Last week there were a series of huge storms that rolled through eastern Kansas (and OK, NE, MO, etc) in the evening and continued all night. We’ve been getting quite a few storm systems this spring, so the ground is soaked already and I barely have to water my garden.

The tornado sirens went off 3-4 times, but there was no sign that I could see, and it hailed about pea sized hail for ten minutes. We were under a flood watch. Then the sun went down, we went to bed (with our windows open), only to be shocked awake at about 3am by one of the loudest cracks of thunder I’ve heard in my life. The cats scattered, Natalie and I jolted up, finally closed the windows, and watched more hail bounce off the front walkway. This time it was very windy, and the hail varied wildly in size, but on average was about as large as marbles. Our sump pump never came on, but some friends’ basement flooded.

In the morning, the sun popped in and out, and I went for my usual walk. Everything was flooded. Rough water coursed through the drainage easements and aboveground pipes, the grass was soaked, all my flowers drooped, and once I made it to a neighborhood with curbs, I saw about fifty earthworms floating along the rapids toward the sewer. Too many to save.

But there weren’t many limbs down, just leaf litter and sticks everywhere, a few dead vines torn from the trees.

And then I saw it, when it was right beside me.

I startled. I stood there. The hole was about a foot across, and its edges were maybe a handspan thick. Grass roots dangled from the rim down into nothing. I shifted my angle and could see down about 6 ft at first, then my eyes adjusted and I noticed the round corrugated metal curve of a buried storm drain. The cavernous hole widened and deepened along the pipe at least to ten ft, maybe more in the shadows where I could not see.

Then I noticed the section of sidewalk under my feet was bent toward the crack and about half an inch lower than the rest of the sidewalk.

I leapt away, heart pounding, and a hot flash of anxiety made sweat break out all over my body as I was hit by several very fast and elaborate intrusive thoughts about me falling in, various scenarios, my dog falling in (he’s been dead 6 years!) and dragging me down, or my dog falling in (he definitely would have he was so derpy) and the leash jerking out of my hand while he was washed away. I started walking hard, calming down, but still these scenarios kept popping up. The sinkhole was behind several duplexes with shared backyards and I know kids live there—and all of it is about two blocks from an elementary school. You get the drift. Somebody was going to die. I am a catastrophizer.

It took me too long to find the number for the correct city department, and of course they weren’t open yet. I thought about going back to The Hole to stand guard, but that was silly, right? I kept walking, left a message with the city, I kept thinking about somebody else’s dog falling in, or a child, and I couldn’t relax into my walk even when I reached the stretch through the little forest with the normally very soothing creek.

I called the city again and got a hold of someone who sounded as horrified as me about The Hole, and said she’d dispatch people right away.

WHEW.

Almost immediately after I hung up I saw a perfect little baby bunny under some black locust trees, so small it could fit in one of my hands. It filled me with joy, they always do, and I felt my spirits rising until I suddenly thought, no bunny don’t fall into The Hole, even though The Hole was farther away from the baby bunny than it would probably travel in its entire lifetime.

The reason I was reading THE MERCY MAKERS is because I’ve been trying to (re)write Book 3. I wasn’t worried (at the time) about plot holes, I was looking for promises I made in book 1 that I should really consider keeping in the trilogy conclusion. I was looking to determine which characters I need to focus on with regards to more or less closure, and yes I was trying to decide who to kill and why and how and who to save, and how the traumas of book 1 and book 2 would change which characters the most, etc.

I honestly didn’t expect to find a plot hole, no matter how small, especially not one that was too late to fix because it’s in THE SHAPE OF MONSTERS which has already gone to print.

The thing is I just have to let go of it. I can’t fix it, there’s no point in finding a way to finagle the world building in book 3 because why point it out when it’s so small? It isn’t ruining anything! Probably nobody is going to notice!

I’m low key Buddhist now! I can let it go. For sure.

For. Sure.

OK, the real REAL reason I was rereading, the reason I am in this situation, is because I deleted 70,000 words from the draft of Book 3.

I reread THE MERCY MAKERS hoping to find a single solitary detail to answer all my problems and give me something to refocus on in Book 3. I would have been happy for this to be a plot hole big enough I could put emergency netting and traffic cones around it and point Iriset in the right direction to deal with it.

Instead I found a little one.

The question is, should I let it go, or should I peer deeper and figure out if it’s just a mistake, a little hole easily filled in with sand, or if it’s something I can unearth to reveal a whole cavern of wonderful crystals and use them to flesh out the conflicts I’m chewing on and discover some solutions that are really really neat. Then it’ll look like I was doing it on purpose the whole time! BWAHAHAHAHA! I MEANT for that to happen, you reread book 1 after finishing the whole trilogy and see this detail and are mind-blown at how good I am.

Because the thing is, the thing is, like The Hole, this wee plot hole looks very small from a distance, at a casual glance, a casual reader probably will walk right on by. But if I really think about it, if I really look, it points down to a massive missing chunk of foundational magical world building dirt (to totally over-lean into this metaphor). I have to fix it, or somebody’s dog is going to fall in and probably that dog will be named Tessa’s Self Respect.

It’s been ten days as of writing this, and The Hole is still there.

Probably nobody is going to fall in while the city arranges to fix it, but the sidewalk is definitely slowly sinking so in the meantime I’m not walking on that side of the street.

In the meantime I am drafting a totally different book, letting all the pieces of THE MERCY MAKERS and THE SHAPE OF MONSTERS and [BOOK THREE TITLE REDACTED] swirl and settle and pop and rise constantly in the background, occasionally in the foreground, and maybe quite a bit in the underground.

I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

If this essay feels to you like it isn’t quite coming together…I have to agree. But I can’t see what’s missing, which I suppose is right on point. -__-

It’s fine for me to send this newsletter without it coming together perfectly, but I cannot do that with Book 3!

I can, however, remind everyone that THE SHAPE OF MONSTERS comes out in 6 weeks! June 16th!!!

Here’s the first page:

I’m very excited for SHAPE to be out in the world, and I hope it unlocks some of whatever’s holding me back from finishing the third book.

Coming JUNE 16TH! Preorder from The Raven Bookstore in Lawrence KS if you’d like a signed copy!

Thanks for reading!

Tessa