I made a big boo-boo and only just realized it.  When I started writing “Darkness Comes to Kingswell,” I said it was an online draft and you might see disparities as the story develops.  That means I’m posting it as I write it.  As I explained to Jenny yesterday, that’s how my fiction develops: I write and write and write until the whole story spills out of me, and only then do I go back and clarify, tighten, clean-up, and otherwise edit the work.  Sure, I might go back and make minor corrections or clarifications as more information develops, but generally I just spill what’s in my head and worry about it afterward.  This case is slightly different since I’m posting it online and you folks are reading it.

That said, I need to redact something I posted in part five of the story.  When I reread it earlier today, it occurred to me that one specific segment was going to cause all manner of incongruity as the rest of the story develops.  That segment is the following excerpt of the MSNBC news report:

Again, to repeat our top story… At approximately 5:50 A.M. Eastern Time this morning, an event occurred that psychologists are calling a “highly unusual manifestation of mass-delusional hysteria and shared hallucination.” The event lasted a few seconds at most and affected all people around the globe. Those who were asleep experienced it as a dream while those who were awake experienced it as a daydream or waking dream. MSNBC can confirm that, at the time of the event, even our staff in the MSNBC studios witnessed the same thing as those who were asleep. While we cannot positively identify the source of the phenomena, we can briefly explain what we believe occurred.

All reports indicate the event was similar around the globe with minor personal qualifiers in each individual experience.

That must change if the course of the story is to remain coherent.  Therefore, I am editing that section to read as follows (and I have also made this correction in the original post):

Again, to repeat our top story…  For approximately the last 18 hours, an event has been occurring that psychologists are calling a “highly unusual manifestation of mass-delusional hysteria and shared hallucination.”  Reports indicate people around the globe are experiencing a similar dream during sleep.  This event is still ongoing.  While we cannot positively identify the source of the phenomena, we can briefly explain what we know to be occurring.

All reports indicate the event has been uncannily similar around the globe with minor qualifiers in each individual experience that are personal in nature.

I apologize for the confusion.  I normally wouldn’t care about it since no one would see the draft and the correction would be made before the story was finalized.  This is a special case and required me to correct it publicly to head off possible confusion later.

Also note this correction required a few very minor changes a bit later in the same post, but those are inconsequential (mainly changes in verb tenses).

Finally, no, I won’t tell you why the changes are important.  I will say I had inadvertently derailed the storyline (although that wouldn’t have been obvious to you yet).