Reading and Writing by Bonnie Le Hamilton

Writers are readers, that’s just what we do. If we’re not writing, you’ll probably find us with our face in a book. And that’s just where you could find me the last few weeks. I’ve actually been doing a lot more reading than I probably should have, and very little had to do with my book club.

As you may already know I’m a big fan of Dick Francis, and well, this last month I finally got my hands on all four of Dick and Felix Francis’ books with Sid Halley as the hero. Meaning, I’ve spent a ton of time reading those books in order for a change. I had read three of them, but not all four, and never in order. Boy does it make a difference.

Not always in a good way.

I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the books − the writing is fantastic. Dick and his son Felix are excellent story tellers, the problem is they weren’t so great with remembering the details about several of the characters' lives.

Yeah, they’re mostly the secondary characters, but those details matter.

In the first Sid Halley novel, Charles Roland had two daughters, of which the elder one was living out of country with her foreign diplomat husband, and their two children. But in the third book Jenny (Sid’s ex, and Charles’ daughter) is an only child.

Also, at the end of the first book Jenny met a diplomat while visiting her sister and fell in love with him, she was engaged. In the second book, she wasn’t married, there was a man in the picture, two actually, but she wasn't married. In the third book she was married to a Lord but they didn’t seem to have a loving or devoted union, more like they lived separate lives. In the fourth book, Charles has two daughters again, but they are both living out of the country with diplomatic husbands, and neither had any children.

And where Sid's friend, Chico Barnes was concerned, in the third book he’d quit being a private eye to settle down; he’d gotten married, and they were expecting. In the fourth book, years later, his marriage had ended because he’d wanted kids and his wife hadn’t. Excuse me?

It was bad enough that at the end of the third book there was no mention of Sid quitting being a P.I. there was no hint that his bride was pregnant, not one word, yet in the fourth book she was pregnant at the time the third book ended and he quit being a P.I. because of that and what happened near the end of that book.

They are all well written stories, and do work as stand-alone books, which is what they are sold as. They aren’t even marketed as a series, but they do have the same main character, you would think they’d keep the story straight from one book to another.

Though in their defense, Dick Francis never planned to write more than one novel with Sid Halley as the hero. The vast majority of his heroes show up in one novel only. The fact that he does have at least two main characters who show up in more than one novel is the exception, not the rule with him. I get the feeling he didn’t make, and keep, detailed notes about the background of the various characters, and certainly didn’t double check those “minor” details before writing the next book in the series.

And I get it, sometimes it is hard to remember all those details, especially if it is years, even decades between books with that character and you write tons of other novels in between. Who even remembers what they wrote a decade, or more, ago?

Even if I pulled up all my files, I wouldn’t be able to tell which stories were started in 2009, because my computer shows last date a file was modified not when the file was started. I have no idea what date I started any of my stories. I can give guesstimates but not exact dates. I’d have to do math to figure out just the year I started any of my novels, if I can even remember that much.

Come on, give me a break, I wrote Forbidden Connection well over a decade ago, and I’ve been doing Nano for something like fourteen years, and I never once saved starting a new story for just November, I can think of a few times when I started more than one story in a single day let alone a single month.

Anyway, how do you keep track of all those minor details in your past stories? What kind of notes do you have? And have you kept them?

Happy writing everyone.