The perils of writing science fiction set in the future...

I did a profile of my main protagonist last year, background story, and so on. So I had her life pretty well rounded out. So this year, while she's still the main protagonist, I'm working the exercises with a secondary protagonist. The problem is, the secondary protagonist isn't from the same era as the main character; due to science-fiction elements such as cryogenics and relativity, she's from the distant past.

Which is still our future.

So I ended up going on a multi-paragraph tangent on the socioeconomic, political, and technological background of her original era, before I could even place her background within it.

Yeah, it took me way more than 15 minutes.

Back in late August, I suggested in my Fantasy newsletter editorial that people writing SF or Fantasy for NaNo should take September to do world-building.

One of these days I might take my own advice...