Midlife Recorder Character Guide

Readers of the Midlife Recorder in Gretna Green series have a lot of requests.
Some things they ask for are already available. (There is a search button up in the top right corner)
Some of them will never be on my list. Because they fall into the category of “No way in hell unless you never want me to write another book – because that would take longer than I might have left on earth.”
Some of them I will do in the future one day when I’m bored.

• An overview of all the realms
• A character guide
• An artist’s representation of the Gateway
• An explanation about this, that, or the other.
• Then we should look at things I’d say were more wishes than requests:
  • The next book more swiftly
  • The series to be finished … yesterday,
  • BUT also
  • Never finished.

So let’s look at what I could do or already have.
If you want more about the realms.
There is Which realm would offer you a tourist visa?
A fun quiz with a printable certificate for the realm you would probably enjoy the most. 😀

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 the last few books. I do keep trying, and if you (or someone you know) might be able to do it, ask them to contact me.

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.

But … if what you really mean is that you have the same kind of memory for names that Niki does, then I have good news.

The Character Guide already exists

Thanks to Amazon’s X-Ray feature.

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 single one of their books than I have in eight) but I love their stories.
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 (think 3-4 weeks) to process a new book immediately after publication.

Example:

Select any character’s name. In this instance, it’s Niki’s late husband, Nick.

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 little while to fully enable it. Because I have to 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 other authors’ books, you find yourself asking, “Who the heck is this character? Didn’t I used to have a functioning memory?” 🤦‍♀️
X-Ray can be that memory for you. 😀
No, it’s not perfect, but it’s here, now, and works on all the books.

Other fun/useful pages.
There’s a Behind the Books index for those of you who wonder how much of the stuff in the Midlife Recorder series is real and how much is actually contemporary fantasy.
Spoiler: Probably more truth than you thought.

Last Christmas I did an Advent calendar full of book-related fun to enliven the dreary December days. You can still see most of it HERE