Cover by Alison Hunt

(Check out Do I Need to Use a Dragon? on Amazon.  Please remember that these are teasers and not the full entries.)

Let’s be honest. We, as authors, can take the passage of time for granted when it comes to our stories. It can feel like an extra, unnecessary aspect to pay attention to since we don’t expect readers to track the days. So, characters will traverse a massive desert in days or train in a new skill without a changing of the seasons. There are times we mention days and weeks so casually that we ignore the fact that our story may have inadvertently spanned a year. We can go the opposite route and fixate so much that the adventure gets bogged down. No, we don’t have to show every day of training or travel. This puts us in a rough spot of having to catalog time while skipping it, which is frustrating when you’d prefer to use that energy for the more visible aspects of the story. Don’t fret though. Plenty of ways to make this quick and painless . . . Well, quicker and less painful at least.

The best tool to use here is a timeline, which you can create as you write. This doesn’t have to be complicated. Just a note of how many days are passing and seeing if you have to change things accordingly. Passing time transitions build up faster than you realize, so it helps to log it at some level. Personally, I try to get a general idea of the season I’m working with because Windemere has four moons with each one being the primary in the sky depending on the time of year. They are different colors, so I need to know the kind of light characters are working with during night scenes. A timeline helps me know if things stay the same or if the next book will be at least one season ahead. Another tool I have is a simple calendar for Windemere, which has months, days in each one, and the connected seasons. Of course, I have yet to mention any of the months in the books because they never come up in my previous books and series. Still, it helps to have the guidance.

When choosing the amount of time that is passing, you need to consider what you are working with. A single story having a massive jump of years might not work because it drastically changes the landscape and characters within the same volume. You can cover days, weeks, and months with more ease and believability. That isn’t to say years can’t be done, but you have to be ready to go back several steps in world-building. If the world is identical after a decade to what it was at the beginning of the book then it won’t feel like time passed. This is why series benefit more from having a volume taking place over days and the overall adventure spanning months or years. You can easily explain why characters are getting stronger if there is a time gap between volumes, but having it be a jump between chapters will be jarring.

You don’t want the passage of time to feel jerky or full of holes. Length of the series and overall plot factor into this as well. Legends of Windemere is about a quest to save the world, which is fairly time sensitive and involves heroes who are being hunted. I could comfortably skip a month or two between volumes, but jumping years takes away the urgency. Meanwhile, War of Nytefall involves a civil war between the two types of vampires in Windemere. Being that the characters are immortal and they are trying to keep their activities a secret from mortals, it can be believed that more than a decade will pass between big, volume-worthy events. All I have to do here is remember to show how Windemere has changed between volumes and over the course of the entire series. This is where you are going to find the biggest challenge when it comes to showing time in your stories.