Explicit Time
I’ve already decided that chapters are going to be my unit of story/plot/logical time. My goal is to have each chapter be approximately the same page count, which is right now about six 8.5×11 pages, and cover approximately the same amount of story/plot, which is right now about one level. It’s nothing as explicit as “each chapter ends with a level-up”, but that’s the general pacing while levels are low and advance quickly.
I’m hitting two-digit chapter numbers (woo hoo!) and I find that I’m having trouble keeping track of actual time.
It’s not uncommon, especially in science fiction, for chapters to have an explicit time and place on them. I’m thinking that I do not want to do that.
For one thing, it’s just another detail to keep track of if I want to change something. I can’t believe the number of tracking spreadsheets that are springing up, already. If I add time to chapter headings, then if I change chapter three, all of a sudden I need to update everything else. It seems like too much bother.
I also like the “endless now” feeling that one gets without it. For example, while 1632 has a defined “landing” point (1632 Thuringia), it doesn’t have a defined “launching” point. It was published in 2000 (and republished in 2013), but there is nothing that screams the date. As a reader in 2026, there are only vague contextual clues that “now” might not be 2026. Having just month and day dates at chapter starts would be weird. If there’s a date, it needs to be a full date, I think.
I have a spreadsheet of the main characters’ character sheets as of the end of each chapter. I think I’m going to add a month/day to that so I can keep track – and hopefully avoid jostling the timeline too much – but leave the reader mostly in the dark.
I’m also leaving place a bit murky. It’s “here” – western mid-west US – but so far it is only vaguely here. I need to nail down the geography very soon so that’s not going to last. I think I can get away with a murky “now” through the whole thing.
On place, I’ve chopped Earth up into equal-area lat/long sectors. I have no idea what to call that shape. At the equator, they’re squares. At the poles, they’re triangles. In spherical geometry, “rectangle” is probably accurate, but in planar geometry, which is our default thinking, “trapezoid” is as close as one can get – but it’s not because the longitude-line sides are curved.
Digression: I don’t think I’ve ever written “trapezoid” before. There is no way that doesn’t have the same root as the “trapezius” muscle. Wikipedia is a rabbit-hole. “trapezoid” is Greek for “table-like” whereas “trapezium” (Euclid’s word for them) is just plain “table”. The muscle was named after the geometric term was established because of the muscle’s shape, which is clearly some weird quirk of history since I’m sure people named muscles – especially big obvious ones that are nearly secondary sexual characteristics – long before geometry was a thing. And now I’m wondering how the Greek word for “table” became the English word for “hanging bars that people swing from”. It’s time to stop.
Marked Up 