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I can think of a few ways: 1) Cheat. This was how Tolkien did it, so you'd be in good company. He just listed somewhere in the appendices that "Year 5798 by Gondor's calendar = 144 Shire Reckoning" and let the readers do the math. 2) Make the characters work out a solution. If you have characters on Terra and characters on Pluto who meet, they're going to ...

five and a half years No hyphens. Hyphens are for adjective phrases: It was a five-and-a-half-year journey. You also don't use the hyphen with the fraction. 51⁄2 years

Different writers have different writing disciplines. Mark Twain said that his discipline was to write a certain number of pages per day, but he wrote in longhand and as he got older he began to write in a larger and larger hand, so that his actual output was less. He was, he confessed, a profoundly lazy man. I read that Stephen King used the "pages per ...

If you are just using dates in narration, as opposed to in dialog, you could just use Gregorian dates. When an American or European writes a history book today, they routinely use the Gregorian calendar even if that's not the calendar used by the people they're talking about. This only matters if the date itself is significant to the subjects. If the ...

From the point of view of practicality it's pretty hard for human beings from earth to adjust to other solar cycles etc. We're not built to operate in days much outside of our current 24 hour clock. People working in locations where the days are unusually long or short (or practically non-existent e.g. the South Pole) experience bizarre physiological and ...

No rules. But some guidelines: Try to stay consistent with the layout of the gaps. There are traditionally two allowed "zones of sparsity": Prologue and epilogue. Other than that, progression should be mostly linear. Bigger gaps are allowed but mark them as such. Four months in a coma shouldn't be a three-asterisk break. It should be a start of another ...

Time lapses, time advancements are used to move the story forward per plot situation, tempo, and cohesiveness. If your story is going to span several generations of characters...well, then, you are going to move the story forward (skipping the non-pertainent boring crap) by time advancements. If your story is going to stay in the moment, perhaps spanning ...

Yes, there is a respected rule: Skip the boring stuff! It depends on your story, on your style and what you want to show. If you have a gunslinger and you want to establish how good he is, you may want to describe in detail his fight against five other people which only lasts a few seconds to a minute. If the reader already knows how good he is, just ...

I would use commas between each component, and use "and" only if the last component is seconds. I learned way back in intermediate school that "and" is only used before fractions (so 10,247 is said "ten thousand, two hundred forty-seven" but 10 7/8 is said "ten and seven-eighths"). I would call seconds the smallest "lay person" time interval — if ...