[Link to the latest chapter of The Maker’s Ark is here, and links to some of my other work are here. Updates are posted irregularly–theoretically every two weeks, but that hasn’t happened for a while.]



Back in 2012, when I first starting regularly writing vignettes and scenes about the characters in what would become The Fall of Doc Future, I wasn’t thinking a lot about long-term continuity. I wasn’t planning on writing a novel–just spinning a few stories to see if I could actually write entertainingly.

I didn’t have an overarching plot. I wrote a series of one-shot drafts and story fragments for practice, out of chronological order. Some of them I later revised and incorporated into Fall, one of them much later (I wrote what became the second epilogue of Fall before I wrote the prologue, more than a year before I posted it.)

I wanted to avoid having to change continuity in anything I had already put up, though, and when I started putting Fall together I recognized there were risks in posting it as a serial without knowing how it was going to end. I tried to leave wiggle room for later changes, and left some things deliberately ambiguous. You can still see the fossilized remnants of story directions in the early chapters that were later abandoned.

When I did start trying to pull Fall together as a coherent novel, I made several false starts, and completely changed the story resolution as late as chapter 16. Writing in tight third person (everything is from the viewpoint of a character) was a boon for this, because it meant that the characters could be, and often were, wrong about the exact details of what was happening. Other early mistakes could be viewed as challenges: “How am I going to write my way out of this?” I learned a lot as a writer doing this, and I plan to revise much of it if I ever manage my long-term goal of formally publishing Fall and its sequels.

But.

There was an early mistake I made, a plot driver I put in that I did not feel that I could change because it was unambiguous, memorable, and load-bearing. It became more and more obvious that it was a weak link for the story as I got to know the characters better. I compounded the mistake by trying to write around it with two sub-plots in Skybreaker’s Call, and it has continued to cause trouble ever since. I’ve known I was going to have to do something about it for years now, but it wasn’t clear to me what the best resolution was–and it would require lots of little changes in various places, no matter what I did. I now have what I feel is a satisfactory solution, but it will still be a big change for anyone who has already read Fall. Warning: Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t read The Fall of Doc Future.

The problem is Flicker’s age.

As serialized, Flicker is 17 at the start of Fall, and doesn’t turn 18 until her birthday at the end of Skybreaker’s Call. "First Date", Flicker’s first encounter with Donner and now chapter 4 of Fall, was a slightly revised version of something I wrote very early. That’s when Flicker’s age became fixed, because I wanted Donner to have a good reason to tell Flicker no at first and generate tension. Big mistake.

Yes, it was a good reason for him to say no. Too good. I no longer find it plausible that Donner could be convinced to change his mind and go ahead with what Flicker wanted after finding out she was 17. He knows better. He has to. It might have been believable if I’d set Fall in the 80s–but not in the 2010s. He’d be sympathetic and tell her to come back when she was 18. But he wouldn’t say yes, any more than Journeyman would when Flicker was 15.

How to fix it in a way that leaves the essential flow of Fall and Call intact? The seeds of the solution were already established in Fall, fairly early. How does anyone on Earth know for sure how old Flicker actually is, at the start of Fall? They can’t. She was a foundling. And there is this (from the original chapter 12 of Fall):

*****

“Was her being your daughter an actual possibility?” Stella raised an eyebrow.

Doc looked uncomfortable. "Well, we’ve never been sure of her exact age because the place she was rescued from had her under the name of another girl who was already dead, that was the scam they were running. The previous orphanage she was transferred from burned down and the records were lost, which I always thought was suspicious.“

*****

Her records were forged, the original records from the first orphanage were lost, and Flicker never had a birth certificate or any human witnesses to her birth, which made it very difficult to her to correct anything. Even after she found out (indirectly, from surviving witnesses of her time at the first orphanage) that the age and birthday in her official records couldn’t possibly be correct. And by that time both the Trickster (who dropped her off at the first orphanage) and Gumshoe (who did the initial digging that resulted in her freedom) were already dead.

So, official retcon, which will be reflected in the revised versions of Fall and Call: Flicker knows (correctly but without conclusive proof) her age (18) and birthday (March 21) in Fall, but is still in the middle of a long struggle to get it corrected everywhere–and until recently, her legal age was 17, so there are still lots of databases that list her as that age (one of which later gets Donner in trouble in Call.) Her birthday in Call will be her 19th birthday. And the revised Chapter 4 of Fall will end up with something like this:

*****

"Wait. Hang on, this should have been my first question. Flicker, how old are you?”

Her shoulders slumped, and she suddenly looked weary. "I’m eighteen, chronologically. And legally, in my home state. But the feds had it wrong, and I’ve been fighting with them about it forever. Some agencies still insist I’m seventeen. I’ve done all the paperwork, over and over, and I’m sick of it.“

"Okay, fair enough, but that’s not the only problem.”

*****

Everything prior to Golden Valkyrie’s return to Earth (14 years before Fall) will get pushed back a year, so Flicker is 10 (instead of 9) when she gets out of the orphanage, 14 when she does her disastrous initial experimentation, and 16 when her first partnership with Journeyman ends.

I’m not going to try to change the original posts unless I have to move to a different platform, because Tumblr changed their editor a few years back in a way that makes it very risky for me to try to edit anything old. But this does let me finally start writing current and future stories without having to worry about making them compatible with two different ages for Flicker.

