At the end of October, in less than a month as of writing this, I’ll mark the one year anniversary of starting work on the novel I’ve been scratching out into countless sheets of digital parchment.

And for the last couple months, the book—the story, the wordcount, the everything—has been stuck at a perpetual eighty percent complete (as I tell anyone who asks.)

My problem in just wrapping up the damn thing has a few little problems, and one big one. The big one: backstory.

I had a great idea. I started plotting it out. I mapped out over one hundred waypoints. I wrote. I fleshed out characters. I wove the plot into a coherent story and built it up to a climactic setup. And then—

See, some of those waypoints were markers on a path but they didn’t really elaborate on the nunace of the trail. Which was fine when I was plotting, planning and packing my bags for this year-long trip. But now that I reached this point in the journey the “figure it out later” part turned into a more immediate problem.

So, I’ve set up camp on the trail and I’ve been writing stuff that—well—isn’t the novel, but is still part of the story. Rather, it’s back story, side story, character profiles, and history of everything and everyone connected with the world. It’s worldbuilding, really, but worldbuilding taking place kinda, sorta, actually half way (well, eighty percent way) into the process.

Vital, yeah. Stalling, a bit. Inevitable, of course.