Time
This may be the hardest part about writing a novel – other than actually typing it out. Authors get this wrong a LOT.
Time in novels must be “stretchy” simply due to the medium. As a counter example, movie scenes must run in real-time because we’re watching people do things – including talk to each other. This can only happen at real-time speeds. Time jumps can only occur off-screen. By and large, this is a solved issue, although I don’t like some of the solutions. For example, a scene of people saying goodbye and driving off, cut to a wide shot of travel (e.g. car driving on road), cut to people arriving and saying hello.
Nothing in a novel must (or even can) take place in real-time. Reading dialog is not related to the speed at which it would be spoken. Reading about traveling is not related to the speed or distance of that travel. This already throws wrenches into mental cogs. Add in an author’s impatience to tell his story along with a predilection for action and very odd things can happen with time.
At the beginning, I picked Atlas as the exemplar of this. It’s hardly alone. I’m reading another one, now (Smith of the Small Gods). Our intrepid hero has been in town for two and half days. He has already fought off the bandit chief, awakened a god in the forge at which he wants to apprentice, saved a miner from cave-dwelling lizard people, fought off an assassin, unclogged the town well – awakening the god of the well in the process, saved an arsonist, and gotten a romantic interest. It all reads just fine until one reflects on it. While it would be awkward, just throwing in “the next day” at the start of each chapter would improve that problem (at the expense of creating another).
In an unusual reverse case, I just caught up with the author of another series (Magic Eater at book four) that is very much on the “Lit” side of LitRPG. The writing is very Fantasy, which means lots of adjectives and multi-clause sentences. The author’s great, but his fight scenes tend to read in slow motion because there are too many words. It bothered me subconsciously, until I figured out what was going on. I picked one, extracted it, and have spent hours – going on days, now – trying to rewrite it to be fast without destroying the author’s intent and style. I can only hope that no reader will put my work under that sort of microscope. It’s totally not fair to the author because the entire scene is only about ten paragraphs (I’ve rewritten four). If one spent an hour writing each paragraph, one would never finish a book. I just wanted to know exactly what bugged me about it and if it could be fixed. The answer to the former is “sentences are too long”. The answer to the latter is “not easily”.
Earlier, we established that I loathe going backward in time. I have no doubt it will happen because backstory is a thing, but I will do it as carefully as possible.
Skipping forward in time is less jarring, but still difficult, which is why I think so few (new?) authors do it. Recovery is one way to do that. After a big fight, our intrepid hero needs a bit of rest to let his body recover. LitRPG brings magic, including healing potions, to the table. This is handy because a serious injury, which happens in battles, will not require months, if not years, of recovery. Training montages are common trope to move time along without writing that much about the details occurring during the interval.
Spending too much time on day-to-day life experiences has a tendency to turn an adventure into a slice-of-life cozy. That’s not necessarily “bad”, but it’s not the point of most LitRPG books. How to Succeed in Monster Farming After Getting Rejected by the Hero Guild: A Monster Ranching LitRPG is a good counter example, although I have issues with the title length with the book number at the end, which is truncated off the end in about half the user interfaces on the planet.
Where does this leave me? If the apocalypse happens in summer and I end the first book with the first snowfall, I have August, September, October, and November to work with. Perhaps July, if I need it. The goals are “grow the pack” and “find a group to survive the winter with”.
Our intrepid werewolves will be running about the countryside both exploring to see what’s changed and purposefully getting into fights with monsters to get stronger. Having them run into people once a week gives me sixteen groups of people to work with. That seems sufficient and unrushed.
Initially, they’ll be the speed of wolves, which is about that of horses, so around 20 mph (a bit fast over time for either). As they grow stronger, they’ll get faster. My intent is to get them up to car speed (60 mph). Not sure if that’s book one or book two, but relatively quickly. Our (contemporary Americans) travel sense is based on driving. It’s difficult to wrap one’s head around medieval travel times and distances because they’re so slow and short. A series that does a great job of dealing with that is Stiger’s Tigers. It has lots of “army on the move” scenes and 12 miles is a pretty good day – and we see why. Ugh. No. I want modern travel times – or faster. [Heads up if you’re going to read it: It’s very gory. Getting hacked with swords and axes in battle is gory and the author does not pull punches (much).]
One reason that I want my werewolves roaming is that I’m using the concept of the system acknowledging the claiming of territory (for me, that’s near-theft from Primal Hunter; others have done it, but that’s where I discovered it). They’re going to claim it accidentally just from pissing in the woods, which wolves do.
Side note: One of the themes that will run through the first several books is that democratic and republican forms of government don’t work when a lot of people are superheroes. Yes, everyone is still born equal, but that equality falls away FAST as some get super strong. Being Americans who are trying to establish a community, that’s something our intrepid werewolves are going to run into headlong, several times.
I’ve had the system chop Earth into equal sized sectors, which can be claimed. I worked it backwards: At reasonable speeds, how big of a circumference could be traveled? How much area is inside that? How many of those would fit on the Earth?
Because I find human-centric everything moderately annoying, I’ve made the system base-12, not base-10. This means that things happen on what are, to us, weird boundaries. It will take a while for our intrepid heroes to figure that out and the repercussions are critical for the story. For “I’m just the dumb system doing my programmed thing” reasons, I want there to be a base-12 round number of sectors. 100 base-12 (a gross, 144 base-10) is far too few (only three sectors would have the area of the US). 10,000 base-12 (a myriad, 20,736 base-10) is far too many; a sector would be under 1000 (base-10) square miles, which is only about 130 miles in perimeter. That leaves an obvious choice in the middle: 1,000 base-12 (which has no name in English). That’s too big – about the size of Wyoming. Our intrepid werewolves cannot run around the perimeter of Wyoming in a couple of weeks in order to claim it. See, this was about time, after all.
The answer that I came up with, which I’m not terribly pleased with, is 2,600 base-12 (4,320 base-10) sectors. At the equator, this is 3 degrees per side, which is 207 miles. That’s handy as 3 is a common base-12 factor. Obviously, that changes as one goes north (south, too). Running around an 800 mile perimeter in a couple of weeks is possible.
At 100 miles per day, it’s only eight days. They’re wolves, which means they do not need to setup and teardown camp every day. It also means they can hunt along the way and don’t need to spend time cooking, which is going to be a fun scene to write (“You want me to eat this raw?!?!”). There are only two of them, so coordination isn’t an issue. At 20 mph, 100 miles is five hours. Don’t forget eight hours for sleep. That leaves 11 hours per day for dealing with side issues – such as the fact that they’re not trying to claim a particular territory (which no one knows is even a thing), so it’s going to be more than a straight-line 800 miles.
Time and actions-of-weight need to fit together properly. There’s no issue with having an intrepid hero do 100 things in one day. They just can’t all be of the “awakened a god” sort. Obviously, I’m going to cover the often overlooked urination – and even make it meta-funny in that it accidentally gives them territory and a title.
Another side-note: I still haven’t decided if our new system-fortified selves are subject to the myriad of ills associated with failed sanitation services. I don’t think it much matters. Cities, where that is the biggest issue, are going to fall apart for other reasons. My “system arrives and causes apocalypse” theory is based entirely on human nature, not what the system directly does. For example, if one is suddenly super fast and strong, is one going to continue to put up with that annoying boss? What about gang members who can suddenly throw fireballs? The system arrival, per se, does not cause the apocalypse. We do it to ourselves by breaking the fragile networks that hold everything together in the contemporary world. As opposed to, for example, the coronal mass ejection that ends the world in Fire from the Sky. The power grid fails not because electrons stop working as electrons do, but because no one wants to be a lineman or a copper miner. Sea monsters eating ocean-going ships falls kind-of in the middle and only lasts until people get strong enough to kill the sea monsters. But who is going to weld new ships together? Where does the steel come from when no one wants to be a railroad scheduler?
I’m not sure where this series is going to end up going, but a magitech enabled human resurgence is definitely one of the possibilities.
Marked Up 