Sir Walter Scott, in Marmion, wrote “Oh, what tangled webs we weave/when first we practice to deceive…” That’s a perfect description of the fiction writer creating imagined worlds.  We invent layers of pseudo-reality, webs intricately connecting myriad details and worked into patterns that give the reader a sense of reality.  But writers are humans with embarrassingly short memories when it comes to which minor character left on a voyage two chapters ago–or in the previous book–and thus is not available to hand the protagonist an important message.   We’ve forgotten…but readers (some readers anyway) will notice and gleefully (or angrily) point out the mistake.

Prudent writers put all the salient details down in a notebook or separate computer file and refer to this often.  When I wrote the original Paksworld books (UK | ANZ), I had notebooks containing all sorts of useful details.  I knew that someday I’d write in that universe again, and I kept “everything.”  When I started the new series of books, I knew I had the old notebooks and the old maps.  I knew that until I tried to find them.

The notebooks, on the bottom shelf of the east wall of my work room…weren’t on that shelf when I looked for them.  The master map, stored flat on the old drafting table under a protective cover…wasn’t there when I lifted the cover.  

At some point, I’d moved the master map, the small maps, and the notebooks to a “safer” place.  But in the fifteen or so years since the last time I’d used them…I forgot where the safe place was.  In the meantime, my mother had died, and we’d moved things from this house into that house and from that house into this house.  Most things had been moved at least once.  The old computer files are now unreadable (thanks to changes in both storage media and software, plus some aging of the old floppies.) The books themselves did not contain everything I needed (since so much of it was deep background) but five fat volumes contain a lot more detail than the writer wants to have to dig through without any helpful index. That’s a lot of tangled web.

I have new computer files now (the “names” file alone is 16 pages) and a new master map.  Where possible, I checked against the old books–but I miss the depth of detail in the missing reference stuff.  I miss the side-stories (the story of the shepherd who tried to steal a golden fleece from the Dort the Master Shepherd, and Torre’s intervention, for instance. I remember the gist of the story, but not the details, and the details informed someone’s ideas about both shepherds and Torre “somewhere” in the original books.).

So a bit of advice to other world-building writers: store all the detailed notes as hard-copy, in something a different color from your other stuff: flame orange or screaming purple or whatever.  Check on it once a year at least.  If you have to move (even from room to room) carry your precious data in your own arms–do not let it out of your sight.  Helpful people may think it’s trash and throw it out.  Writer stuff often looks like trash to non-writers.  Transfer the computer data faithfully from whatever medium and software you were using to the new stuff you’re dealing with now.

Otherwise you’ll have a panic when you find that the stuff you saved so carefully–intended to have available when you needed it–went *poof*.