Keeping Our Books Current

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

My thirteen year old daughter uses an iPod device for most of her communications (which only works when on wi-fi) but also has a basic phone for when she’s away from wi-fi or needs to make calls. But she rarely uses the phone.

She discovered recently that she had voice mails on it.  But she was having a hard time accessing them.

Sadly, I was doing something else every single time she brought this up over a period of several days.  This is something I try hard to avoid as a parent.  My goal is to be 100% focused on my children as they are speaking with me.  But on these occasions I was either driving on an interstate highway in heavy traffic,  cooking something rather complicated, or doing some sort of multitasking (poorly, I’m sure) during these conversations.

Finally, on the fourth or fifth occasion of her mentioning that she couldn’t access her voice mails, I sat down with her.

“Show me exactly what you’re doing,” I said.

“So, the voice mailbox asks me to enter my password and then hit ‘pound’,” she said.  “And I’m positive I’m putting in the right password, but it keeps telling me I’m wrong.”

“Show me,” I said.

She then proceeded to hit the asterisk on her keyboard.”

“Whoa, whoa!” I said, “That’s not the pound key!”

She frowned at me.  “It’s not? Which one is pound?”

I pointed to it.

“That one? But that’s the hashtag.”

I stared at her.  So…this generation doesn’t even know what a pound symbol is?

“It is a hashtag.  But it used to be called ‘pound,” I explained. “It’s also called a number sign.”

“Well, why wouldn’t they call it a hashtag?  That’s what it is!” she said in complete frustration.

It reminded me again about the huge gulf between generations.  It feels like it’s constantly widening with the quickly changing technology. And there are only 30 years between my daughter and myself.

This made me think…again…about my books and keeping them current.

Although my strategy may eventually change, I’m now making very few references in my books that could potentially date them.

The times when I do make references (usually to technology, but now I’m even leery about mentioning Saturday mail delivery, etc.) I make note of them in a separate document.

There will be a time when I won’t mind that my books are charmingly dated.  But that time might honestly be after I’m dead.  Right now, I’m finding the appeal in making my Myrtle stories as timeless as I possibly can.

One thing about digital publishing is that we can always go back in and tinker with it. I guess that’s a blessing and a curse.

This is not to say that I don’t read books that act as period pieces because I do and I love them.  I’m just not at the point that I want my books to be that way.  If I know I’m reading a book first published in the 70s, a reference to a pay phone or a rotary phone isn’t a bit jarring. But it could be distracting to a reader who wasn’t immediately aware they were reading an older book….and digital books don’t yellow like mass market paperbacks.

Right now, I wouldn’t want a reader to hit a wall with my story the way my daughter did with the pound symbol.

At some point I suppose I’ll let go of this, although I’m not sure when that will be. Heck, maybe I won’t….maybe I’ll include eccentric provisions in my will instructing my poor executor to make regular updates to my books.  Complete with a list of all questionable references that might require updating.

Technology is so integrated into our daily lives that we can’t not talk about it.  But my references are fairly general.  How do you feel about dated books?  Do you deliberately avoid mentioning Twitter or LinkedIn in your stories?  Would you ever consider updating your books…or are you already updating them?

 

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