🚀The Dark Age: The most difficult character to write

Hello, friends!

I've just finished writing a new scene in Fran's part of The Dark Age. Fran's story is woven throughout the entire novel, but this part belongs entirely to her. It tells a braided story, pulling together three different stages of her life:

• Recent past: Fran is adrift. She's middle-aged. Argus, the ship carrying her husband—the ship that she was supposed to pilot—launched thirty years before. Her daughter is gone, living far away and rarely in touch. Fran's not only grounded from flying missions for her space agency, but she's now been forced into retirement. Her purpose is gone.
• Childhood: Fran lives with her aunt, a kind and very religious woman. Every week she's towed along while her aunt volunteers at the church. Fran finds no meaning in the church, but two events crystallize her purpose: She discovers a rural airfield near her home, and she hears Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" text read aloud. A calling has announced itself, and she is listening.
• Present: Fran has thoroughly lost her spark. She loses her way, tries to plug the void with new relationships. One night, a boyfriend serves up a double feature: Two very old movies about spaceflight. The movies light Fran's wick again. She loses the boyfriend, and returns to that airfield of her youth, and feeds her soul by working with planes again.

I've delayed writing Fran's part of the novel longest. Philip was always the clearest character to me. The idea of being separated from the people you love is easy to access. It's one of my own biggest fears, so it's not difficult to pull that thread, then write what it unearths. And Elle's story is similar, because everyone can relate, in one way or another, to feeling second-best, particularly to your own family.