Uh Oh! Worldbuilding Misadventure!

I admit it. I'm a fan fiction writer at heart. I like having a world already created and inserting a couple of characters having a long, intense conversation. But in original science fiction, you've got to come up with the world yourself, and here's where my pay-attention-to-the-characters-first predisposition has gotten the better of me.

There I was, polishing up my nicely revised first chapter of Mercy in preparation for applying to the Oregon Literary Fellowship, and it occurred to me to put in some time filling in actual dates in place of [DATE] notes that have been sitting in the first few paragraphs for four or five years. Shouldn't be a big deal, I figured. The text states that poor 'Eblia has been unconscious for about 20 hours; I may need to tweak that, but the figure should be in the ballpark.

So I pulled out the old astrographic map, checked some Tide (a.k.a. wormhole) locations, and crunched some lightspeed velocity equivalency numbers. Turns out that in the shortest possible journey I can contrive at the fastest allowable speed in the Continuation universe, poor 'Eblia has been unconscious for 375 hours, which is 15 standard days!

This is surmountable. For one thing, it's nice to be in a science fiction context where I can conjure up a drug that will slow her metabolism to keep her alive over that stretch of time (not on life support). But this single change forces massive rewriting of the first three chapters—and updating of plot points throughout the story. It changes the order in which people have to meet each other and greatly complicates the intricacy of the conspiracy poor 'Eblia has fallen afoul of. This, by extension, means that 'Eblia is a more important player than I (or she) thought she was. (If she weren't, no one would bother with the immense planning that would have to go in to contriving this long, unconscious space hijacking across at least one border patrol.) Luckily, I can make a case that 'Eblia is that important: after all, hypertelepaths are rare and dangerous spies when properly motivated to suss out your plans. I just wish I known all this four years ago.

The moral of the story: don't wait four or five years to do your world-building homework. It'll bite you.