I'm working on a sequel to my debut novel Falling Up, a post-apocalyptic story of rebuilding from largely frontier technology. The main character is a trader, and that means barter. I set up the situation in the novel to move from that to currency in the sequel, so to research this, I recently read an economics primer called Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science.

When I finished it, I was wondering how I could use that information without getting into all the technical details. I realized that I don't have to provide the reasoning behind the principles, I only have to use them. It's only a matter of having plausible actions in my story.