Creating a whole world

I'm back to chapter 2. My latest scene, Heart in the fire, is an introspective scene that focuses on the character named Dreamer. I've been layering chapter 2 so that the scenes alternate between the ship-side story and the village-side story.

I must admit, I've been finding the village-side story much harder to write, much harder to imagine. Likely that is because I am creating everything from scratch. I am creating a whole new race of people, a whole new culture and customs and characters, and I am trying to make them seem foreign and interesting and credible.

In comparison, telling the ship-side story is much easier, because it's all about humans, and I've watched tons of Star Trek episodes so I have much more familiarity with creating stories about starship crews.