My Beef With Plot Holes

Part of the reason it takes me so long to write one of the Cailen thrillers is my strong detest of plot holes. I find movies hard to enjoy sometimes because so many of them have such giant plot holes I can't even get past it. Haha. Watch a couple "CinemaSins" or "How It Should Have Ended" (HISHE) videos on YouTube and you'll know what I mean. Just keep in mind, "What has been seen, cannot be unseen." Once your mind is opened up to plot holes, you might just see them everywhere. It's a curse. 

Because I am overly aware of them, when I write I agonize over the story and events, endeavoring to make them both plausible and logical, which is not always easy. Sometimes I make a huge mistake and end up having to rewrite small, or sometimes large, portions of the book because the events don't make sense based on one tiny detail that can't be changed or ignored. I'll give you an example of one.

**Spoiler Alert!**

In Critical Play, Jessica is pregnant with the worst morning sickness in all the world. (Slight exaggeration, but if you read it you know what I mean.) After fleeing Jeff's estate following the attack, Dmitri and the gang try to cross back over the Canadian border into the US and head to Toronto. But when the mainland border becomes too hot they head to Alaska instead. Initially, I had Jessica and Tatiana remain with Dmitri, Corvo, Timur and Ivan. I had written all they way up to them getting ambushed at the Alaskan border and fleeing into the woods when I realized that Jessica could have flown home days earlier from Ottawa. She wasn't in trouble with the authorities and could easily cross back to the states with a little help from Gatti. I honestly don't know how I missed that but I ended up trashing a few chapters to rewrite it. Granted, there was much less "Jessica" drama in the following chapters but it just made more sense, and was much easier on Jessica too. Ha.

**End Spoiler Alert**

I'm not sure any book is devoid of all plot holes but hopefully you'll be hard-pressed to point one out in any of my books. I really work hard to sure up loose ends and explain why certain actions are or aren't being taken when you might wonder why they don't do A instead of B. So while I'd like to say all my books are free of plot holes, I'm sure you could probably find one if you really looked hard enough, much to my chagrin. Just please don't tell me, it will drive me nuts. Ha.