I don’t half make life complicated for myself at times. I’ve just given myself a mammoth task thanks to the ongoing development of Joe Wilkie.

I’ll explain.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed (you may not but I certainly have) that Joe Wilkie’s vocabulary has been progressively changing over the course of the 4 novels he features in so far and even more so in his fifth outing that I hope to release soon. I know he’s always had that sort of countryside twang that lies somewhere between Dorset, Norfolk and Yorkshire and that’s the main reason that I’ve never revealed the geographical location of Blessham. Only I know which county of England it is set in.

But I have become acutely aware of just how much his vocabulary has altered since his first introduction in Ah Boy! The changes have been fairly subtle but I’m now seeing them myself as large as life and if you were to read all 5 novels in one non-stop sitting you would notice it very quickly I think. You’d probably need a stiff drink as well.

Here’s the thing though, in the novel I’m working on I’ve just about got Joe where I want him regarding the peculiarities of his speech. We know that he’s a slow learner and has always stumbled around complex words, although I never intended him to be mocked for that but seen as a have-a-go-hero instead. In the new novel though I’ve expanded his vocabulary to be even more disjointed, if that makes sense.

For example:

In Ah Boy! Joe would use the word ‘before’ whereas now it has morphed in to ‘afore.’ Similarly, where he once would have said ‘them’ he now says ‘they’ or ‘they’s’ a lot more. There are loads more examples but I’d rather you read the books yourself and see how Joe has evolved over the series.

Which brings me to the mammoth task I mentioned at the start.

Do I now go back and revise all the other Blessham Books to keep Joe’s vocabulary uniform throughout the series? And believe me that is a mammoth task, albeit an easy one from a time perspective because I’m independently published and therefore can do as I jolly well please with Joe or any of my characters. Let me tell you I’m giving it a lot of due consideration. It’s a project that could take maybe six months or more to complete but I feel that in the name of continuity it needs doing.

Talking of giving myself a bigger workload, I’ve started a Blessham database using Microsoft Access. Oh, how I wish I had done this sooner. I’ve got a database for all the characters, one for locations – buildings, towns and villages, one for Joe’s own descriptors e.g. ‘hoppy-onion’ for opinion, and one for future characters that I’m hoping to introduce or just to have in reserve.

Once the database is complete I’ll be able to iron out a few little foibles with the books that have been niggling away at me. The main one being continuity with names. For example, I have used the name Perton several times but with three different surnames – Ardbuns, Shayply and (most recently) Curvey. Now, Perton is not a common name and it would be highly unlikely to find 3 individuals with that name in a medium sized English village and the fact of the matter is that all the Pertons in the books are one and the same person (or one and the same Perton – see what I did there?) And I have come to the decision that Perton Curvey works best, ergo I now have to edit all other references to his name in the other novels to make that all important continuity work.

Like all genuine novelists, I want my work to be authentic and believable, even though it is fictional, and having the same character with three different surnames or the main character constantly changing the way he speaks is an issue that I need to address.