Several of my books are interconnected. Though not a series, the characters from several books live in the same area of the United States. Occasionally too, a main character from one book, will have a small part in another tale, as long as I can justify why they are there. I have been working on these books since I was about 16, maybe 17, (I did plenty of writing before that time, most of it isn’t worth reading though!)  but only recently did I begin to do any written timeline work. That’s when I began to see some problems…

Grandmother’s Letters is my current most active project. I have set a deadline to complete a draft of it by the end of this month. During all of my re-reading and partial reworking of the first half of the book, I started noticing a few mistakes… The first was in a scene where Louise, one of my main characters, finds an old wedding dress. In that scene I marked the wedding dress to be at least 175 years old. There’s nothing wrong with that… until I double checked my math and figured out the year that the dress would have been made. Somehow I managed to be more than 25 years off track! The dress wasn’t quite 150 years old!

That was only the beginning. I have a scene where a character from one of my other books, Christine, makes a short, but needed appearance. When the young man comes on the scene, he is between the ages of 21-22 years old. The problem? When I compared dates with his book, I realized that I was 3 years off! However, if I simply changed the age of the young man, it completely ruined the scene, since certain events in his life had to be passed, before he could do what he did in Grandmother’s Letters. Now, Christine does need a major amount of editing and possibly a re-write in several areas, so I considered simply pushing back the date, but I couldn’t push back the date, unless I did the same thing to yet another book, because then, I would have a death in the wrong place. After looking at the books though, rearranging a few things and changing a birthday of one of my characters, I think I have it figured out. A Year with the Potters and Christine have been pushed back by about three years, and though it will take some re-writing, especially on the part of Christine, it will be much easier than altering Grandmother’s Letters and everything should flow in harmony again.

What’s more, I learned my lesson that timelines are important, at least for me. I have a written timeline for Grandmother’s Letters in good and working order now. I’m also working on one for my books as a whole, that way I can keep from mixing up the dates of my character’s major life events.

So, my question for my readers: do you use timelines? Do you write them down, or do you just go off your memory?

To the KING be all the glory!

Part of the story focuses around a treasure hunt. Right now I have at least three people on the search, two of which are working together. Unlike most treasure hunts though, there isn’t really anywhere to start. The two girls who have begun to search, keep trying to chase down leads, mostly to no avail. They know who the treasure belonged to, they know what it is supposed to consist of, they simply aren’t sure why it disappeared or where it went!

As Louise and Priscilla search around the town of Halcer, I suddenly realized that though I have several books set in the same area, featuring the same town, I really haven’t explored much of it.  I mean I “know” what Halcer looks like; but I’m not really acquainted with it enough to keep myself from making terrible mistakes. Like where I put two different families on the same side of town and then mentioned, more than once, how long the drive between them was. That was a problem. So, I started mapping. I mapped out nearly the entire town of Evergreen for 24 Days Before Christmas, but since Halcer is much bigger than Evergreen, I’m only doing sections of it. At least at this point. Most of my characters don’t actually live in Halcer in this book, they’re just visiting a lot and mostly in one section of town.

My maps are nothing fancy at all. In fact, they probably look kind of silly, but they are helping me to keep things straight and I’m really enjoying the experience of drawing them out! Naming streets is perhaps the most difficult… well naming anything is pretty difficult for me, unless it’s a characters first name. I do like the names I’ve managed to come up with! The “houses” look completely fake and the patch of palm trees is just a section of circles, but at least I have a better idea of the area now!

Now, if I could just figure out the street names for Arborville, I would actually know exactly where the rest of my characters live! Oh! and many thanks to Aubrey and Mrs. Havig for inspiring me by their posts, to get to know the “world” around my characters better! :)

To the KING be all the glory!