The Canon of Restart Again, and How I’ve Broken It

Hello, everyone! Today’s blog post comes in the wake of a question I’ve been asking myself over the past month or so: “How many published continuity errors can I find in the Restart Again series?” It might seem like a bit of a random post to make out of nowhere, so allow the following announcement to give you some context:

Restart Again: Volume 6 has officially started production! There’s been a fair amount of “behind the scenes” work on the book dating back to before Volume 5 was even published, but I actually put the first words to “paper” in the last few days of August. Since then, I’ve already written two rough draft chapters, and a third is nearly complete! It’s a promising writing pace compared to where I was at the end of Volume 5; the document currently stands at over 11K words, which was about my monthly average last time around, so given my lack of consistent writing time over the past few weeks, I’m doing great! I’m doing my best to remember that this is indeed a draft, and as such, I’m allowing myself a bit of grace to leave things a bit unpolished in order to get through more narrative in every writing session. If you’re interested in reading the chapters as they go live, you can click HERE to find them on my Patreon!

Now, how does any of that relate to the title of this blog post? In an effort to avoid any major plot holes or canon errors, I’ve been mainlining the audiobook versions of my series at work over the past month or so. (Side note: I can’t remember if I’ve announced this already, but the audiobook adaptation of Volume 5 has an official release date of December 3rd, 2024. I’ll make a quick announcement post with a link when preorders go live!) I’ve been blasting through the series on 1.7x speed, and absorbing all of that information in such a short amount of time has revealed that there are a few details that seem to….shift a bit as the story goes on. Fortunately for me, I haven’t encountered any massive plot holes that completely break the series or ruin upcoming plot points, but there are definitely some inconsistencies. As such, I thought it might be interesting the catalog them all in one place!

Naming Errors

I think the first error we encounter in the series is a simple naming mistake from Volume 1. When Lux is first introduced to the currency in Kaldan, he’s told that the rare golden coins are called lower-case-i “imperiums”. By the end of the book, it shifts to an upper-case-i “Imperium”, and when they are next mentioned in Volume 2, they’re called “Imperials”, which is how they’ve been referred to ever since. This is just a flat-out error. Truth be told, I actually like Imperials better than Imperiums, so I’m glad that’s where it landed in the end, but I clearly just forgot what I wrote in Volume 1 and half-remembered it for Volume 2. Whoops!

Speaking of names that changed between Volumes 1 & 2, we have Lux’s favorite foreign food, the asperfruit…or was it the asperberry? I actually caught this error when I was writing Volume 4 and did my best to handwave/retcon the inconsistency, but at the end of the day, it was just an error. For the entirety of Volume 1, the spiced-cream-filled peppers are only referred to as “asperfruits”. In Volume 2, they’re again called “asperfruits” for 5 out of their 6 appearances, but for some reason, in one instance, I called them “asperberries”. When they make their meager two appearances in Volume 3, they’re called “asperberries” both times. This is clearly another case of me forgetting what I wrote and incorrectly assuming I remembered it.

However, I officially canonized BOTH names in Volume 4! When Siv asks to get “berries” at the market, Lux makes a comment that he’s delighted to see she’s referring to “asperfruits, the delicate, cream-filled berries I had acquired a taste for”. The implication is that people colloquially refer to them as either name, but it’s really just a cover for the fact that I hallucinated the second name. How fun!

Arc Sesaude

I was a bit dismayed to encounter a simple line of dialogue at the end of Volume 2 that, after the events of Volume 5, create what I believe to be the largest continuity error of the series. When first making her plans to work with Marten on his trading business, Marin offhandedly mentions that “My dad is a cooper in Yoria. He moved to a larger workshop about ten years ago when he got a contract with the royal family, and Marten has been delivering his supplies ever since!” Oof.

To be fair to myself, it’s still a pretty small set of errors in the grand scheme of things, but it’s technically wrong on multiple fronts. Arc Sesaude (who had yet to actually be named or developed when I wrote Volume 2) is now on-page as a blacksmith, not a cooper. He contracts with the city guard for maintenance and repair of their weapons, which I suppose you could say is working for the “royal family” if you’re being generous. However, that breaks on multiple fronts when you consider the “ten years ago” bit: In Volume 5, Val specifically says he has ALWAYS contracted for the city guard, and the house we find both of her parents in is the one she grew up in as a child, meaning he also didn’t move to a larger workshop.

Given that Marin gives the details in such a throwaway line, I doubt many people even realized that Arc had been mentioned in passing three books before he shows up in the flesh, but an error is an error!

Lux’s Arrival in Hedaat

Yet another early passage that comes back to bite me in the end! As much as I like to pretend I’ve had the entire series planned out from day 1, these errors make it clear that that’s very much not the case. There are two points I want to mention here: An inconsistency, and a technically-not-wrong-but-weird passage.

First, the inconsistency: Lux arrives in the brutal cold of Hedaat after tumbling out of the void for the second time. He’s a bit distraught (understandably, I suppose), and he pretty quickly gives up and collapses into the snow. The passage in question mentions that his hands are going numb and that he’s “not equipped in the slightest for cold weather”, but Lux’s famously magical cloak is confirmed to have been given to him in Alderea in Volume 3. Therefore, he would be wearing it when he arrived in Hedaat, and would be PERFECTLY equipped for the cold weather. I think my initial intention was to give him the climate-fighting cloak in Hedaat, which makes sense given how applicable it is there, but I ended up going in a different direction and forgetting I ever said this. My bad!

Secondly, the weird passage: Lux is calling out for his lost companions when he first arrives in Hedaat. He mainly shouts for Amaya (obviously), but he DOES mentioned both Kel and Jarut, as well. However, as he continues to panic, he says, “You’re going to be okay, Amaya. I’m not leaving you.” When you combine that with the mention of the fresh blood splashed across his chest and gloves, a reader would most likely believe that Amaya had been injured in his arms when he left Alderea. However, we later learn that Kel is the one who gets injured in the end, so this is sort of….weird, in current canon? You could generously interpret it as Lux just being extremely distressed and calling out for his wife, but in truth, it’s just an error. I remember specifically coating Lux in blood that wasn’t his when I wrote that passage for Volume 1, but I didn’t exactly know whose blood it was. If that was the case, I probably shouldn’t have made it so clear that it was supposed to be Amaya’s, but hey, live and learn, right?

Tyr Is Blind

Perhaps an obvious statement if you’ve read Volume 4, right? This one isn’t technically an error, but with the way it was written, I wouldn’t blame anyone for interpreting what I wrote as a mistake. When Lux and Company are doing their initial investigation into the Mimic threat in Doram, they read through a bunch of file folders. I rightly pointed out that Lux and Lia can’t read Doramese, so they work on file-organizing duty, but Tyr seemingly has no issue reading over the file folders which are most certainly not written in braille.

Now, how is this not an error, you might ask? Well, simple! Tyr’s Detection has become so developed over the course of her life that she can detect the miniscule variations of the ink on the paper! I say that jokingly, but it’s actually what I intended, and if I haven’t done it already (I’ll have to do extra research to confirm or deny it), Lux either already has or will learn to do this soon enough, as well. In the moment, though, I can totally understand how someone could read the passage and go, “Wait a minute, how is the blind woman reading a book?” (Note: I just listened to this passage today and momentarily had that thought).

At the moment, that’s all I have for this post, but seeing as I’m still writing the series, there’s always room for more mistakes! If I ever stumble upon any for myself in the future, I think I’ll pop back in here and update this post, adding the date I found it to the entry as necessary. Who knows? Keeping all of this in one place could turn out to be a pretty handy tool for me at some point! Also, if any of you readers out there have noticed a continuity error that I didn’t list here, drop it in the comments below! Until then, though, thanks for joining me on this strange journey through my mistakes. I hope it was at least a little entertaining for you! Stay safe out there, and as always, thanks for reading!

~Adam