Writing a series of novels can be a lot more complex than producing one-off books.  The stories can weave round each other.  One book might show the same event but from a different perspective to another.  Different characters can remember or interpret things in different ways, and so on.  Time and exact chronology thus become very important.

As you know, I keep a very detailed character database for the ‘Saltbury Chronicles’ series.  It makes it easy for me to look up anything about a character from their eye colour, birthday and a hundred and one other details from their address to their height or even bra size.  But I also keep a detailed timeline for the entire ‘Saltbury’ series so that if one story needs to hark back to something that happened in another, I can instantly check when it happened and make sure I don’t have little glitches like the central character apparently forgetting their own birthday.  I can recommend that other writers do the same.

One of the last things I always do before a book goes for publication is to check that my timeline is thoroughly up to date and has no clashes.  It’s a surprising amount of work.  The document is well over 60 typescript pages long now and currently extends from the birth of Martine Fauld on 17^th April 1955, to the present day.

I spent yesterday building the final ebook file for ‘Saltbury Tales’ so it can be uploaded to Kindle on time on the 17th March, and now I am doing the chronology check.  This one is more complicated than usual because the book is a collection of seven mini-novels, rather than one single story, and some of them interrelate both with each other and with other books from the series.

Of course I check the chronology as I write, and check it again as I edit (because the story often evolves and changes at that stage), but it’s amazing how errors still creep in.  And guess what, I just caught a mismatch of a whole week in one of the ‘Saltbury Tales’ called ‘Aleyse’.  OK it went all the way back to April 1976 and only concerned the date of a ‘Xeroed’ band rehearsal, but it still counts.  Readers notice if you get these little details wrong and they can get quite sarcastic about it.

The thing is that people like to believe in the reality of a story.  They like feeling part of the story’s world.  It’s something that books have always done better than movies.  But that suspension of disbelief is always fragile.  If you give the reader little jolts they will see through the trick and they might be thrown back to reality feeling pretty grumpy.