attackfish

That wasn't really what I meant. There's a difference between me having thought through how everything works, and having researched it, and knowing how every little piece fits together, and me actually showing anybody else. I might know for example in the #@$*% White Collar dystopian fic I'm writing (which is holding up everything else, if you were wondering. I'm starting to hate it, but I'm 33,000 words in) I know that the world economy fell apart after global climate change got to a tipping point that led to wide scale famines. There was a global die-off that pushed poor populations the world over into war with the West. Nuclear bombs were dropped, food was hoarded, billions died, humans almost went extinct. Eventually, the US succeeded in taking control of the entire world as a global government. But the US constitutional government had little control left, and the world government that formed in the wake of the wars and the mass dying was a totalitarian regime in the control of big business. This government instituted slavery. Several hundred years later, the world government has democratized somewhat, but slavery as an institution remains mostly unquestioned. Slavery has replaced our current reliance on labor from the global south, and is mostly hidden in day to day life, as few slaves are owned by private citizens. I'm having the damnedest time fitting any of this information into the story itself without bogging it down in exposition. And yes, the fact that I know how it all works affects what I'm writing in that fic, and why, but that doesn't mean there's a good place for me to put all of what I've crafted about this world into the story. Basically, plot and character takes a heck of a lot of research, and world-building is part of that, but sometimes not all of it ends up on paper in obvious ways.