Hidden Faces: The story behind the story

The sixth Applied Science story, Hidden Faces, is up at Big Pulp. Of all of them, this is the one I found most frustrating. I don’t mean that it’s bad, only that it’s the furthest from what I had in mind when I started.
My original concept was a kind of day-in-the-life thing where Steve and Gwen and a couple of other Science Investigations agents (Brit expat Jo Davies and her wolf of a partner Kevin Trueblood) are going through routine investigations: Cults that think we should worship the aliens, far-right whackjobs convinced Eisenhower and Nixon are ETS (not so implausible: the John Birch Society claimed Ike and Truman were Soviet agents) and other everyday people affected by the alien invasions, kaijin and weird science of my alternate history.
Only that just didn’t work. I kept feeling I needed a plot so finally I went ahead and added one, bridging the gap from the sabotage in Blood and Steel to the confrontation with the villain behind it in Mind That Wanted the World (out next month). But I didn’t want that as the main plot, so I made it one strand as Jo and Trueblood cross paths with FBI agent Mickey Moon and discover they have an investigation in common. Meanwhile, Steve and Gwen go through routine security checks for possible alien infiltrators—and one of them turns out to be not so routine.
I think it works well, but I still wish I’d pulled off that slice of life thing.