Plot holes

Rrrr, it bugs me when I run across plot holes in my stories. They don’t tend to be major things, and they don’t tend to be things that most readers would ever figure out on their own, but there are enough anal-retentive/obsessive-compulsive types out there that would find these and be bothered by them that I try to fix as many holes as I possibly can. It’s difficult though, because sometimes correcting plot holes makes for a bad story or makes for a more difficult time in telling the story.

So far in this novel (the second in the Solennelle & O series), I’ve come across two such digressions from logic, and both have involved magical spells affecting one of the characters. When I originally came up with the story outline and the overall plot, I figured I had pretty well covered all the bases and had crafted a fairly solid story. Yeah, well, I guess not. I know how much it bugs me to find inconsistencies and leaps of illogic, so I want to avoid the same in my own writings. Now I have to rewrite an entire section because of a part of the story that I had had to rewrite earlier in the novel because the earlier part was faulty and now so is this part. It’s a mess. I wish I could pull the “I’m writing fantasy so I’ll just be lazy and ignore logic and science and all that,” but I can’t because I’m too into realism despite the fantastical setting of the novel. Frustrating.

So now that I’m 60 pages away from finishing the second run-through of editing, I have to stop and rewrite part of the story, thus delaying the chance to say, “Yay! Done editing!” (Even though I’ll really just go through and edit it once or twice more before publishing. OCD, yeah.) I wonder how I’m going to have to resolve this current plot hole. Luckily, the hole’s more like a mouse hole rather than the type of hole you could drive a minivan through. At least there’s that.

Addendum: Re-reading what I was just editing to figure out a way to close the plot hole, I realized that it isn’t a plot hole after all. I had accidentally skipped reading a couple paragraphs so it seemed like a plot hole but really isn’t. Hooray for me! I’m better at this consistency thing than I thought.