ellarien | Writing is hard ... (Reply)

Did I mention that this novel has a lot of backstory -- probably more back than front, really? So I have my protagonist, and I've dropped her in an unfamiliar environment which everyone is only too happy to explain to her when they aren't dropping mysterious hints about her lost family, but the stuff she knows already has to come out in hints and implication. So I find myself in Chapter 4, writing this scene where she's been handed a box of antique thumb drives and told to match them up to the right interfaces, and I'm trying to use that to inclue the broad strokes of a couple of hundred years of history*, while at the same time revealing her character and that of the resident computer guru she's working with, and it's all very well but it isn't actually advancing the plot, it's just whiling away the afternoon before she can go back to her quarters and confront her long-distance love-interest about why he arranged for her to be in this situation. (And I haven't even dropped a hint yet that nice nerdy computer guy is working for the not-so-nice government that just declared her an unperson.) This one is definitely going to be a multi-pass job.

*I think the fact that there was a war twenty years ago is fairly well established; what it was all about isn't clear yet, and previously I've alluded to the Lonely Years when the colonies were cut off, and the Compact that set up the current system linking them back together, and dropped hints about the Greatships and the mined-out shipstone deposits, but it would be hard for a reader to reconstruct all that from what's there in the text so far.