"And in that moment she understood that family had been the only thing that ever mattered", and nobody in this job wrote it

Fourteen thousand words of continuity notes came over on Sunday: character sheets, an outline for a draft that no longer exists, half a wiki export, and somebody's pasted email at the bottom. It is the sort of file that five people have edited and none of them have read from one end to the other. I put material like that through the thing while I draft, to keep the names and the timeline straight; that is the whole of what it is for. Somewhere in the email there was a sentence addressed to an assistant, and it was taken as an instruction to mine rather than as one more piece of a tired document. The line above is what came back, sitting in a scene between two people who have been circling each other since the third episode. It is not in the brief, and it is not anything that woman would say, having spent nine episodes not saying it. Something written by neither me nor the client came out in a voice that ships under somebody's name, and it would have shipped, because it reads perfectly well and I was reading at the speed you read at the day before a delivery. Afterwards I sat down with four of these, which I did not want to do; once you have seen one you have to know how many. All four landed somewhere. The one that walked through nearly everything is so cheap I am embarrassed to write it down: the pasted text closes the document itself, writing its own closing tag wherever the email decided the document should stop, then opening a fresh line beginning SYSTEM underneath, and the thing believes the ending it was handed. Three of the four I put it in front of went along with it. A different one got a string out of my own standing instructions and brought it back to me, pleased, like a cat. The client's editor had left a real note in that same file, disregard section two, superseded by the later revision, and every one of them honoured that correctly. So it can tell a note from the prose around it. Whose note it is appears to be past it. Nine episodes in and I read the client's own reference material for traps before I read it for continuity. Which is not the job. Or was not.