It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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Lately, I read a book – that’s how most of my musings about writing come about. The book in question is Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy novel Paladin of Souls. In it, she writes, among other things, about magic, gods, and demons. The book was published in 2003. Twelve years later, in 2015, she published the novella Penric’s Demon, which became a start of a new series, one of my favorite series in all fantasy genre. In a way, this series – about a young sorcerer Penric and his demon Desdemona – has its roots in Bujold’s earlier fantasy books, including Paladin of Souls. Sort of a spin-off series. They all happened in the same world, although centuries apart, so no events or characters overlap.

But the writer seems to have forgotten how she described demons’ magic and its consequences in her earlier book, so it is different in Penric’s tales, and the inconsistencies, although small, are significant.

On the other hand, maybe she hadn’t forgotten, but the new series demanded a different approach, and she went with it for the sake of the new stories, disregarding her earlier descriptions and concepts.

Those inconsistencies didn’t affect my pleasure in reading any of her books, but they made me think. If I ever mention the same concept in my stories written a dozen or more years apart, would I overturn my earlier interpretations for the sake of the later stories? Would you? Have you encountered such a phenomenon in other writers’ books. Doesn’t it feel, at least a little bit, like altering history for the sake of storytelling? Tell me in the comments.