Research is a very important thing to do, when you’re writing.

Some of my friends disagree, telling me that the story is the thing and one should feel free to “make stuff up” but I’ve tried to be a little more grounded than that. Not that I mind if I’m reading a novel and the author allows their hero to board an underground train at Piccadilly Circus three years before it opened.

Years ago, when all I wrote was science fiction, I could get away with murder. (You want to create an alien race that breathes radioactive methane? Go for it…) If I get things wrong in historical fiction, however, people ask awkward questions. You get comments if you make a mistake when you mention how many rounds a Mauser C96 can hold. (And yes, I know the radio station that was captured on the first night of the Hungarian Revolution was put out of action in the process – but I chose to have my rebels listening to a broadcast the next morning. Historical fiction is still fiction: I just liked it better that way.)

Sometimes, you make things up. Politician Jakob Puskas and his Christian Centrist party aren’t real… but if I’d put Viktor Orban into ‘Budapest’ as the far-right politician, my novel would have had… baggage. Instead, I chose to make stuff up. It’s permitted!

Sometimes, the things you make up can be unfortunate – and particularly when the truth is stranger than fiction and you can no longer tell whether life is imitating art or vice-versa. In ‘America’s Most Haunted’ – a freebie short story that probably didn’t get subjected to quite the same process of fact checking – I had Jake the computer nerd talking about Spungecoin, a new cryptocurrency that he’d invented:

“Oh, don’t worry,” Jake said airily. “I’m quids in: I don’t mind sharing the wealth.”

“Oh, you’re doing well?” I asked. It seemed unlikely.

“Yeah,” he said. “Spungecoin’s really taking off.”

“Spongecoin?” I asked. “You invested in some dodgy cryptocurrency?”

“Spunge – spelled with a ‘U’,” Jake explained. “And I didn’t invest in a dodgy cryptocurrency: I created one of my own.”

“You did?”

“Sure, why not?”

I could think of lots of reasons why not, but Jake’s confidence was unshakable.

“And it’s going well?”

“It’s already been banned in China. And the original app’s been banned by Apple.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No – it’s great! Free publicity, basically.”

It never occurred to me that such a stupid thing might actually exist, but it does. (Or did, anyway.)

A recent Google search informed me of this. What I found bore all the hallmarks of a classic crypto pump-and-dump. Fill your boots: this thing is gonna go to the moon… the word salad that described the purpose of the new cryptocurrency and the obligatory, insincere messages from investors whose only hope of making a profit lies in finding somebody else to buy their worthless digi-tokens off them. It’s an industry that’s turned into a parody of itself and hasn’t even noticed.

The real Spungecoin now trades (actually, nobody’s trading it) at $0.000067. In happier times, at its all-time high, Spunge was worth almost a cent. Call me crazy, but I’d rather have a small disc of copper-plated zinc with Abraham Lincoln stamped on it: a little piece of history.

It remains to be seen whether the Spungecoin people will hit me with a cease-and-desist or perhaps sue me for all the money I made from my free story. You never know: I’m sure they can afford to hire a lot of hotshot lawyers with their $0.000067 Spunges, although they’d probably tell you that this isn’t a good time to cash out – because this thing is going to the moon, baby.

While I’m on the subject of ‘America’s Most Haunted’, a quick tip o’ the hat to David Fletcher, MBE: the inspiration for the character of Saul Bowman. Mr Fletcher, who you might know as the presenter of many videos in the Tank Chats series recently announced his retirement after an extraordinary career as the longest-serving member of staff at The Tank Museum in Bovington. Those of us who are enthusiastic about such things owe a lot to him.