desperance

This novella I am poking at, it is an SF piece I wrote, oh, perhaps eighteen months ago? And showed to my agent for feedback; and he fedback, to the effect that I haven't poked at it for eighteen months.

He thinks it needs work, and I'm sure he is right. At the time, I looked at his notes and wept quietly, and then reread the novella and wanted to tear it up entirely and rewrite it from scratch, with all different words. So then I put it away for a while, and I've only just let it out again.

And now I don't want to tear it up, so that's good; and I still don't disagree with John's notes, so that's good too. And I'm working through the story doing rewrites like a good author. Only I've hit that bit where he wants me to explain why this cool future culture is so paranoid about identity, and I can't immediately see any way to do that except with a straight download, "we are paranoid about identity because..."

Which I have already done, in the short story "Terminal", which you can read online here. But you can't just drop in a link from one story to another, that would be cheating even if the technology allowed it; and you can't expect a reader to be genned up on earlier works, or a publisher to include the short story with the novella just to make things clear. So I need to find a way to do this again, to drop in the info without cluttering the tale; and, right here right now, I can't.

Am sitting here poking at it, writing infodump just as a placeholder and hating it. Grr, snarl. And the unfruitful temptation, of course, is to blame my agent for demanding it. How dare he? How dare he not intuit what seems so obvious to me? Of course such a culture would be paranoid about identity, how could it not be, it's inherent...?