That other old devil of mine; time jumps

[Ursa major]

Ursa and I are always right. Especially when we disagree

It's as if our views are (comma) spliced together in some mysterious way.

 

[alchemist]

A background event as a point of reference, seasons/weather etc. I don't know how useful this advice is, but I hope it helps even a little bit.

I think putting the date on top works best in this situation, a Very Important Event, i.e. Apocalypse + 5 days.

Otherwise, the reader may have to keep looking back to see how far this chapter, May 14th 2045, is from the first chapter. In this case, it's probably best to put the information into the text in some way.

 

[WJCherf]

I read somewhere in this blog an issue about chapter titles. Could you not use chapter titles that contained chronological information?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Another possibility, maybe; I'll have a look at that. For now I've stuck the designators in.

 

[Pyan]

As an aside, I recall** one of the Rendezvous with Rama sequels having a paragraph where something was happening, then a lot of time passed (months, a year or so; I can't remember) in a few words, and then something else happened. The clumsiness - though I expect the writer*** thought he was being clever - pulled me right out of the story.

David Eddings does this as well - there's one place at the end of a chapter in (I think) the Malloreon where he spends six pages describing how the travellers set up camp, what they ate and chatted about - and then starts the next chapter "A month later..."...

Alastair Reynolds does this in Revelation Space. (With long distances covered by sub-light ships****, and scenes set on those ships and on their origins and destinations, not to mention some folk kept in some sort of suspended animation, apparently contemporary events, in terms of the plot, could happen decades apart. He had to put dates in.)

Downbelow Station, by CJ Cherryh, is set in three main locations, with simultaneous action going on - so not only does she use date, time and place headings for each chapter, but at the head of paragraphs that jump in location/time within the chapter as well. Makes for hard reading at times, but seems to work overall.