Quote:
Originally Posted by Keryl Raist
I'd say for any author writing a series the step before the final edit should be re-reading the book(s) that came before. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows desperately needed this step. So has many lesser known novels.
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That has to be the single most enlightened and helpful statement I've read in quite a while. It's obviously not restricted to authors but anyone in the content creation industry, and not just fiction.
The reason why your post stood out to me wasn't just that it's true but since authors many times write summaries (although I have my doubts if it's actually the authors or someone else writing them in many cases) it can come as a shock when the very first chapter clashes with previously established events.
Overlapping events, incorrect references, outright omissions of what we were previously told was important. I realize that it certainly isn't intentional and much of it must be cause by the rewrite hell phase, but I just can't accept it. Maybe I'm overly critical simply because I've opted to only read fully finished series, thus I always read books back to back and, unfortunately, have an easier time to spot problems of this nature because of it. If a year or two had passed between books then I might not have noticed them.