Confusing Friends by Molly MacRae

 

Did your mother remember your name when you were a child? Or did she, like mine, do this: “Andy, I mean Jack, Jeb . . .” Head shaking. “Jenny, Cammy . . . Wales Koyen, I mean Molly will you please set the table for supper?” Wales was our cat, Koyen our dog. This only happened when Mom had other things on her mind. My brothers and sisters and I got a kick out of the confusion when it happened, though. Mom often had other things on her mind.

Q: Is Mom looking at Cammy, Jenny, Jeb, Andy, Molly, or Jack?
A: Koyen 

A question, the other day, from fellow Writers Who Kill blogger Susan Van Kirk reminded me of that confusion. Susan writes the Endurance Mysteries and is now also writing the Art Center Mysteries. She asked, “How do you keep multiple series straight?

Good question. And I’ll admit that I’ve muddled the names of my own children and grandchildren. But do I muddle my series? Not really. I tend not to confuse places or sets of friends in real life and it works the same way in fiction. While I’m ‘in’ one of my series locations – Tennessee, Scotland, Massachusetts, California – I know where I am and with whom I’m hanging out. The trouble comes in record keeping. Two of my series begin with H and end in shop (Haunted Yarn Shop, Highland Bookshop), so sometimes I save something for the Highland series in a Haunted file and vice versa. It’s a careless but not infrequent mistake. (Ooh, maybe the files are haunted.)

By now I have a lot of characters to keep track of, but I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of their names from the beginning. The spreadsheet has three pages. The first lists characters alphabetically by first name. The second lists them by last name. The third lists them by nickname. Each sheet also tells which books they appear in. This has been very helpful.

Fun, and the possibility for confusion, comes when I drop one series into another. In Argyles and Arsenic, book 5 in the Highland Bookshop Mysteries, there’s a knitting competition going on in town. As a tie-in to the competition, the Haunted Yarn Shop books are on display in the front window of Yon Bonnie Books. Margaret Welch, the protagonist in my series of short stories that appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, is now writing very real books. She’s written two books in the Secrets of Castleton Manor Library series, two in the Museum of Mystery series, and is all set to write a book in the Whistle Stop Café mystery series. How is a fictitious person writing books, you ask? We’re buddies and she’s letting me use her name as my pen name. (Thanks, Margaret!) She’s added to the fun by having the main character in the Museum of Mystery series read and enjoy the Secrets of Castleton Manor Library books.   

One of Margaret's books. She and I would both like to drive that car.

Confusing any of the books with real life is a whole nother* problem. When one of my characters is waiting for a text to come in, I’ve found myself checking my phone for the text. More than once. I tried to Google the distance between Inversgail and Oban in Scotland. Oban exists. Inversgail is my own invention. And, in a nod to Mom’s muddling of her children’s names, I end up calling my character Janet Janice when I’m with my critique partner Janice. What do I do then? Shake my head.

Thanks for the great question, Susan. 

*A whole nother is an example of a tmesis—separating the parts of a compound word by inserting one or more other words, often rude ones. A tmesis is also called an infix.

How do you keep your characters or series straight? Do you have a favorite tmesis?