Just a one-stop page to help you find all the Behind the Books articles and character details more easily.
Behind the Midlife Recorder series of books
Mabon and Pant y Wern — read the inspiration for the messy Red Celt capital.
The Smiths and their iron jewellery —read the history behind Hugh’s comments
Coming soon:
Gretna Green — how does the reality stack up to the Midlife Recorder series? This may end up being in several parts.
Simnel Cake — As featured in all the books but especially Code Yellow in Gretna Green—what it is and isn’t.
The Character Guide already exists
A lot of readers of the Midlife Recorder in Gretna Green series ask for a character guide, an artist’s representation of the Gateway, or an overview of all the realms. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an artist who can do a realistic representation of the Gateway yet. And that won’t be helped by the changes that are coming in Market Forces.
A character guide would be multiple spoilers in disguise unless I kept it so bland it was almost useless. (Look, sometimes even clarifying a sibling relationship is a spoiler.)
So you can’t have that from me until the first ten books in the series are completed.
Does it work on all Kindles?
It works on every one I’ve ever had since Amazon turned it on—which from memory was back in the days of the “Keyboard kindle”
It also works on the various Kindle apps for phones and tablets.
A lot of authors truly don’t seem to know it’s available and free to them and to their readers. They only have to tick a box.
If you go to any book’s page on Amazon and scroll down. On the left you’ll see these details above the author photo. X-Ray will either be enabled or not.
I found a couple of authors whose sprawling series I adore and asked them if they would please enable it (because they have more characters in any one of their books than I have in six) but I love their stories and they just did it. And I only emailed them as ‘a reader’
All my books are X-Ray enabled – which means you can highlight a character’s name to remind yourself who they are. There’s a lot of information hidden behind the scenes in the X-Ray feature.
Please Note: It sometimes takes Amazon a little while to process a new book after publication.
Example:
Select any character’s name. In this instance Nick’s.
And then if you select Open X-Ray you will get this
And then if you hit the back arrow < at the top to the left of the word Nick. You will get the full X-Ray menu and see something like this:
All my books are X-Ray enabled at publication. In reality, with a newly published book, it can take Amazon a day or two to fully enable it. But I do go in and edit some entries manually.
Because most of the X-Ray features are currently compiled on a book by book basis, you are much less likely to find spoilers for the later books in the Midlife Recorder series.
Do you remember back in the day some of us took our tea break with a game of Solitaire?
Well, thirty-some years on, I often edit the X-Ray results for the Midlife Recorder series while I’m taking a break from writing or editing.
So, while they’re not infallible and spoilers are definitely still possible —it’s much less likely than with a character list.
I hope it helps you get more enjoyment out of the books when, as I often do myself in others’ books, you say, “Who the heck is this character? Didn’t I used to have a functioning memory?” 🤦♀️
X-Ray can be that memory for you 😀
Linzi