The last few days I have been very busy indeed with a couple of projects. They are related, but it wasn’t my intention to basically bundle them together. I’m glad this happened, because whetting old skills to accomplish both is working. Just… tiring. As I was contemplating what to write about today, I realized that part of the effort I’m putting into the course I’ve been taking, the skills I’m trying to revive, is due to the passage of time. I signed up for the online portion of the course, told my husband the other day ‘it’s been a month or so, I should really finish that up…’

I then signed in to check, and Reader, I’d bought the course in June. It’s October, and I only had six months to complete it. Well, by dint of a couple evenings (it was only four hours long) spent on it, I’m done with the online portion and this morning will complete the physical testing. The other thing? Well, as I handed the rifle to a friend who was helping me, I told him I’d done the math and I had not hunted with it in fourteen years. Time passed. My muscles and my brain forgot. Fortunately, there are some skills that if you started as a child, do come back as soon as you are shown the first bit and your mind has a handle to pull memories up from the deep wells of the past.

All this to say that I’m writing a story, the novel in progress, where time does not pass. There is, in fact, no time at all. I can get away with this because it’s a pocket of afterlife, intended to be timeless. War waged for eternity. Tiresome, really. Which is why a certain element of the humans trapped in it begin to try and measure time. Order, from chaos. With no sun’s rising, how do you measure time?

While we write a story, few of us authorial types, and even fewer readers, want to have a direct chronological relating of the timeline. Which means you come up with ways to say that time has passed. I often fold those stray days, months, whatever, into the crease invisible between chapters. Scene breaks work for smaller moments. No one really wants to read about the character doing bathroom rituals, unless for some weird reason they are pertinent to the plot.

Just keep in mind that skills erode and decay. If your character is called upon for some martial art (be that hand-to-hand, blades, or firearms) that they have not done in many years, you can’t just have them effortlessly pick it up with any mastery. They will have to train. It won’t take as long as it would for someone starting a new skill, but it will take time and rotates shoulders rebuilding some muscles. You don’t need to describe that blow-by-blow before plunging your hero into action. You should at least acknowledge it.

Also keep in mind that an adult can learn a new skill, like art, but it will be easier to learn if you start them off as a child. Even if the child abandons something, for whatever reason, and then come back to it decades later, having accomplished the skill in the past makes it easier for the adult to obtain it again. If you are writing a mature character picking something up easily, without prior skill building, you’ll need to explain that. Having learned some things as a grown woman, like art, I can attest that the things I did from childhood, like pottery, are more natural to me to regain those skills.

And now, I’m out of time and off to see if a skill I have been trying to learn for a decade (because yes, grown woman when I started) will pass muster to obtain a license. Whee.