Please note that today’s eyecatcher
is a busted clock. Thanks wikihow.

“Comp,” he said, “if I don’t cancel this order within one del, notify Yorki 00247 of everything that has happened in the last dur.”

Yikes, this isn’t working. I’ve really had fun with the idea of decimal time, and I think it is something that these people would actually use. If someone on Home Station were reading what I’ve written so far, they would understand it completely, but I can’t seem to make it work for readers who live on Earth.

It isn’t for lack of trying. There are a dozen little tricks, like saying “later” or “earlier” or using a vague time like “in a while” to avoid the decimal time terms. I made sure that Antrim spends his off hours reading old Earth novels so he is constantly translating into hours and minutes, even though the people around him don’t use our time terms any more. It still doesn’t work. I never realized until this experiment how many times in one novel a time phrase like “wait a minute” is used. My best guess now is about a million.

The other thing from the example at the top, computer names, is working out fine. The reader, just like the people of Home Station, keys in on the first name and ignores the number completely. I could screw this up for myself by using both Lafel 18273 and Lafel 19581, but I’m not masochistic. I don’t even try to remember the numbers. They have a logic — the lower the number the older the person — but I simply have everybody listed on a separate file. Most of the time I just use the first name, and if I need the number, I cut and paste.

It’s not that easy with time terms. Just five minutes ago I had Antrim checking out the computer records on some people he was about to interact with and I needed to make note of their ages. I couldn’t just say “she was a year younger than Antrim and the other two were about two years older.” I could say —

She was about a third of a kilo-det younger than Antrim and the others were nearly a kilo-det older, which told Antrim that she was a year younger and the other two were about two years older.

Arf, snarf, and boogles! That doesn’t even work once, and I seem to need something like that twice a page.

What I actually said when I got to that point was — “I give up”.

From now on, I’ll do what I do in fantasy fiction. In Menhir, Tidac and Cinnabar speak the language of the Inner Kingdom, but I write it in English.

I might make a note in passing that Home Station uses decimal time, but I’m going to write the novel in English. I’m going back to hours and minutes and years.

Ahhhhhhh! Man, that feels better.

I just went back to the paragraph preceding the age snarl and changed it to read, “It was a five minute walk to his destination.”  It didn’t take me twenty minutes (1.2 durs) to figure out how to say three dins (five minutes, more or less) is a way that a reader on Earth would understand.

Much better — but the experiment was still fun.