Every author dreads that email.
"Loved the book! Just one thing — wasn't Piper's hair in ponytails?"
Readers remember. They spend whole books with your characters, and they notice when a detail slips. After a long series like the McTavish Chronicles, with dozens of characters, ghosts, houses and grudges, I can't hold every detail in my head any more. So I don't try. I keep them in StoryLedger and check each new scene against my records before it goes anywhere near a reader.
This week, while writing the opening chapters of the final McTavish instalment, it caught three mistakes.
1. Piper's ponytails
Piper, Iona Reid's daughter, came bouncing into the drawing room with her pigtails swinging. It's a lovely image, and it's wrong. Her StoryLedger record says ponytails, missing teeth and a lisp, and that's how she has looked since she first appeared.
It's a one-word fix, but hair is exactly the kind of thing readers picture, and they notice when the picture changes.
2. Daisy by the window
Daisy is the skeleton in Ray-Bans who lives in Coby's study. In my draft of a fireside scene, she "stood sentinel in the corner". My records put her by the window, where she has stood for books.
The same line also called her "Daisy's skeleton", as if the skeleton were something she owned. Daisy is the skeleton. Readers who love her would have felt that one.
3. The wrong Sinclair
This was my favourite. Driving through Serenity Falls, Coby raises a rude finger at the statue of Lord Sinclair on the roundabout and grumbles, "He nearly killed me."
My records disagreed. The statue is of Lord Sinclair Senior, who died in 1920. The man who nearly killed Coby is his grandson.
The fix was four words: "His grandson nearly killed me." And the line got funnier. Now Coby isn't just rude to a statue; he's holding a dead man responsible for his grandson's sins.
And when the ledger was wrong
A story bible doesn't overrule you. It remembers for you. This week it also told me that Coby's ex-wife, Elaine, had left him for his best friend. That's not quite how it happened: she had the affair, Coby knew, and he walked out. So I updated the record, and it's right for every scene that follows.
That's the point. You're still the author. StoryLedger just makes sure you never have to remember the same thing twice.
Meet Inky
Every good ledger needs a keeper, and StoryLedger's is Inky.
He's a scruffy, cream-coated terrier with one ink-dark ear, a green collar and a brass tag. He is the keeper of lost threads. When a detail slips out of your story and falls into The Unwritten, the place where forgotten hair colours, misplaced skeletons and mixed-up lords end up, Inky goes in after it. He comes back with the thread in his mouth, drops it at your feet and says:
"Found this. Thought you might want it back."
This week he brought back three.
Every thread accounted for
If you're writing a series, or one book with a long memory, give StoryLedger a try. Your readers will never know about the mistakes it catches, and that's how it should be.