The other thing I want to get people’s ideas on is an excerpt from the DOTF screenplay that I really want to incorporate, where Finn shows PTSD symptoms after recognising a stormtrooper that he’s just killed in battle. Originally the conversation is with Rose, but it will translate fine to being a conversation with Rey - which I actually like, since then we get a reciprocation to Finn offering Rey council about her own problems.

The problem is there’s nowhere easy to insert the conversation. The logical place is somewhere towards the start of the novel - it nicely sets things up for Finn’s eventual interactions with Jannah and the other stormtrooper deserters - but they don’t actually fight directly with stormtroopers until uselessly far into the story. Their first action scene is in the Falcon fighting TIEs, and the second is on skimmers fighting the treadbikes.

I could add something on Kijimi before they reach Babu Frik’s workshop, but even that is around the half way mark, which is a bit too late to start introducing stuff that should have been introduced in the first act. Do I somehow add some one-on-one fighting in one of the earlier scenes? I’d have to create a lot out of whole cloth, and I feel like it would drag the pace unnecessarily unless I cut an existing action scene, which feels like it ventures too far outside my scope and into fanfiction territory.