Got a little further with the supplemental work for Jump Space — trying to keep the family trees straight! There are a lot of characters, it’s very complicated! I had sketched it out on big sheets of paper, but that wasn’t going to be very easy to share with Jed for editing, or any of my friends giving feedback (Dan, Alex). I’m hoping this will help. 
At some point, I’d like to add dates in too, and various notes, at least for myself to help keep track, but the free family tree chart maker I used (https://www.familyecho.com) doesn’t have a lot of options for that kind of thing. Will likely have to transfer all this over to Word at some point, so I can make it part of the manuscript, but I’ll worry about that another time. Maybe I’ll have a publisher by then, who can convert these for me?
But to give it credit, the site seems perfectly happy to give your people as many primary partners as you want (and defaults to partner instead of spouse or husband/wife), and if you turn off the auto-coding for male / female (which goes blue and pink, sigh), it just defaults to a neutral ‘other’ option. Everyone in my chart is ‘other’ at the moment, because the blue and pink was driving me nuts.
Some of the families are very compact — others have LOTS of kids and end up covering a lot of space on the page.
Don’t look at these in detail unless you want to risk spoilers — they’ll tell you things like who someone marries after they ditch their husband, or who is adopted or fostered by someone after something happens to their birth family. I’m figuring they’ll probably end up at the end of the book, in an Appendix for those who would like a little help keeping everyone straight…
There are some new characters added in the last round of revisions that I need to add, but it’s pretty close to done. In theory, I should go on to do the story timeline next, but I think I want to wait until I finish the next round of workshopping, just in case anything major changes.
Timelines are honestly a pain in the rear; when I had to do one for Bodies in Motion, I was able to persuade someone I was dating at the time, a meticulous sort of person, to do it for me. Maybe I can get my editor to do it?
