There’s one particular archive that doesn’t need very much attention when it comes to updating the damned thing. And that’s the published archive. The stuff that’s out there. Your books. There’s no need to dive back in and change the fucking plots of your published books. So what would you change, then?
Now and again, when the blue moon shines brightly and the slithey toves dance beneath its silken rays, it is worth checking in and checking up on things. Just in case.
At some random point in the year, determined by the sacred reading of the magic chicken bones, the time draws nigh when it is the Festival of Casting a Weary Eye on the Published Works. Looking for glitches. And those get stitches. Glitches?
By that, I mean the main problem with creating electronic books: hyperlinks leading out to information roadkill on the information roads, highways, and backwater byways. Information roadkill. Now-useless links that lead to dead zones where the page is not found. What was once a handy tool has now deformed into the annoying husk of a dead link.
This search for defunct hyperlinks is akin to sweeping up autumn leaves in the windless garden, or dusting a semi-forgotten room. Time settles on the landscape. Nifty brushwork fixes a few problems. The easiest way to scour electronic books for computerised difficulties is to create links that will stand all the tests of time.
Or most of them, anyway. Hyperlinks that run out to Amazon entries for other books of yours – those are pretty much solid. A link to a handy YouTube video as an example of something you’ve written of in the general text – not so much. As solid as mulch. So. Design your links to avoid being obsolete in that department. Save yourself a bother in the first place.
What else would have to change, besides pesky outdoor hyperlinks? Formatting glitches, if I spot them. I like to think I’ve spotted them all. How do you see invisible formatting glitches, though? I previewed the books by paging through them all the way to the end and then all the way back to the start.
That’s when glitches showed up. Page forward, page by page. Nothing. Page back the same way. Something. Jump forward through hyperlink after hyperlink inside the book – checking the chapter hyperlinks. Then you see things.
I’d march forward a few pages and then work back inside a chapter, only to suddenly find the text changing size. Ouch. I’ve commented on this before…but it is worth covering here. I’d had sample Kindle books from other authors, and found pure garbage spewed out when you clicked back through one chapter heading at a time.
What causes this? Aliens. I’m not saying it was aliens. But it was aliens. Loads of things. Being electronically sloppy and not realising you are being utterly electronically sloppy. I would go looking for a phrase on the internet, just to confirm the details. Then I’d find the saying wasn’t quite right as I’d heard it. So instead of typing the phrase out, I’d just copy and paste. That brought hidden formatting into my work.
Luckily, I performed the usual checks and everything went haywire. That’s why I make the usual checks. So narrowing down the culprit wasn’t a lifetime’s work. Those sort of formatting issues are gone. I changed how I assembled books, so I wouldn’t have to deal with that nonsense again.
Bringing a comma or an apostrophe or quotation marks into your work off the internet can wreck your work. If you have enough formatting glitches in your e-book, Amazon will slap you down.
Whether for internal or external use, every hyperlink is checked on creation – chapter links are especially troublesome if you don’t take care. Those internal links are done and dusted at the time. They never go out of fashion, dahlings. All the internal stuff builds up into a solid framework. Here’s a contents page, leading to part one of the book and part two of the book and part three of the book…
Part one hyperlink. Takes you to a sub-contents page with chapter one and chapter two and chapter three and chapter four. All those chapter headings lead back to the sub-contents page, and the sub-contents page returns to the main contents page. Rivers have their tributaries. And you should be able to navigate your way along the entire network in both directions with ease.
Once the basic formula is set up, and works, you have a template for other books and, again, you save yourself a load of bother. If the template works. It’s been a long time since I hyperlinked a chapter heading to itself. Must have been a slow coffee day. I clicked on the link three times before I realised what I’d done.
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What needs checking, at a distance? Facts that could land you in court if you don’t get your facts straight. In the world of fiction, you should never have any trouble on that score. Don’t write thinly-veiled hatchet jobs about living people who are easy to identify. You may land in the frying pan.
On the other hand, the odd fact dropped into your fiction may be in need of an update if new archaeological evidence comes to light.
Or planetological evidence. Serial groper Isaac Asimov wrote a murder mystery called The Dying Night. Not to spoil the plot if you care to read it, but the plot hinges on a planet being a certain way. This was the view at the time of writing.
Later, when planetary science had advanced a bit, our knowledge increased…generating a massive black hole in Asimov’s plot. He added a note to the story explaining this.
Now, as that was all science fiction, he could have changed the planet from a known quantity to a made-up one. Just call it Planet Rodney Balderdash, after the famed fictional rocket ship pioneer. Explain how the planet works. Then drop the twist in the story right at the end, based on all the set-up you fashioned way at the start.
On reflection, it was most likely for the best that the author simply added a note, took his scientific lumps, and moved the fuck on. If you are going to completely rewrite a story, write a new story instead.
And if you are planning on being a science fiction author, famous or otherwise, don’t grope the fans at conventions. Or, indeed, anywhere on this or any other planet.
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Don’t ignore the tricky business of awkward product placement. Ian Fleming built a literary style out of placing genuine products in his stories about James Bond. You couldn’t get into hot water there, surely?
Staring at a photograph of Ian Fleming with Len Deighton, I’m reminded that neither was a stranger to the law courts. Fleming looks like the sort of toff who would shoot you in the back without thinking once about it – never mind twice. File under Snobbery with Violence.
Deighton nearly always resembles a passed-over major who got where he is today by remembering where most of the bodies were buried. File under Gun-Toting Cookery.
And so we come to an awkward piece of product placement and a stint in libel court for Len Deighton. Funeral in Berlin was the culprit. The date in the story: the 5th of November, which poetically rhymes with remember, remember.
Gunpowder. Treason. And plot. The plot detail involving gunpowder was a step too far for a fireworks company which strenuously objected to the notion that it was somehow profiteering off human misery every November.
The offending passage occurs between Deighton’s unnamed agent and the character Hallam. Hallam doesn’t care for fireworks night, and Deighton drags Brock’s Fireworks company into the fray.
Brock’s fireworks objected in open court and set off a legal banger under Deighton’s arse. The book was republished, minus the offending banter.
They didn’t have our levels of internet, back then. If Deighton published Funeral in Berlin in, say, 2024 instead of 1964, Brock’s fireworks would be trolled endlessly online – implicated in the genetically engineered Covid virus and the faked moon landings.*
*My favourite fake moon landing story is still the one about Buzz Aldrin punching out a conspiracy nut for having the temerity to suggest that the landing was faked. Normally I’d drop this asterisked material at the very end of the blog, but it plays more easily here, for once.
Fleming fared better with his creation of Auric Goldfinger. Grumpy architect Ernő Goldfinger threatened action. Stop the book. Nothing much came of that, except, perhaps, the rather funny delivery of six copies of Goldfinger to Goldfinger when the book was finally published – villain’s name intact.
I’d written of this event in a previous blog, and I see, with trademarked irony, that I didn’t spell the architect’s name right. So, before completing this blog entry on going back in and checking a published archive for glitches, I had to go back in to a published archive and correct a glitch.
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