Time Travel

One of my favorite things about the writing community on Twitter is how everyone supports each other. There are so many writers sharing work and encouraging each other to write more. I love sharing excerpts from The First Kid on Mars, and I've become addicted to haiku challenges, six-word story challenges, photo prompts, and more.

And that's probably why I did a really weird thing last week: I started writing a book in the future. 

That probably needs some explanation, unless you're reading this from the future (which I guess you are, really - please let me know how the book turns out!).

I saw that someone had created a month-long series of prompts for writers of time travel stories (#TimeTravelAuthors), asking authors to share quotes, character notes, and other details from their time travel books. 

I decided I wanted to play, but there was only one problem:

I haven't written a time travel book. 

But if we're talking about time travel, that shouldn't be a problem, right? 

So I decided that I will write a time travel book in the future, and respond to each day's prompts from the perspective of my future book. And then after the month is over, after we've all traveled to the future together, I would write the book and find out what all these answers meant. 

I'm up to Day 9, and so far I've learned that it's the story of 8th-grade geniuses Hannah and George, who accidentally create a time machine when they have to combine their science fair projects. I've seen a couple of quotes, and I know they start in 2016 Chicago and travel to 1984 Detroit (and somewhere else in the future, but I don't know where or when that is yet) to meet Hannah's dad. Everything else is still a mystery. 

I'm trying hard not to cheat, not to think past the daily prompt, to let this future book tell me what it is. I don't know if I'll see this through to the end, but I hope so - I'm excited to see how the book turned out! 

Why Winnie-the-Pooh?

If you've been reading this blog from the beginning, Loyal Reader, you can probably say it along with me:

Also, thanks for reading!

Here's what I do know:

This book, The First Kid on Mars, is the first time I've taken writing seriously in over twenty years. I found myself with a good amount of free time when my son started preschool, and still no clear path back to live theatre with two toddlers, and Covid still keeping small theaters closed. 

I wrote a lot when I was a kid, stopping after college to focus on acting and directing. But now I hadn't written anything since a very long time ago, and I didn't know what to write about. 

I thought I would write picture books -- I'd restart the old Adventures of Aardvark and Axolotl stories my dad used to tell us when I was a kid, and they'd be the next Elephant and Piggie -- but it turns out I can't draw pictures.

So I did some serious thinking, and started seeing the loose threads of a longer story starting to weave together: there was a little girl who loved books and adventures, and her love of books would help guide her through her adventure. It would have to focus on one book in particular, and that book would inform the prose and the structure of my book. I came up with a short list of books I knew well enough that I thought might work:

I tried to think about each one, and how it could help guide a little girl through an adventure (and how it could help guide me through writing a book), and the answer was obvious.

The first chapter started writing itself: 

It all started during Morning Meeting, which on Mondays means Show and Tell. Abby had brought her most important and favorite book, a very old book of stories called Winnie-The-Pooh. Her mom had read the stories to her when Abby was little, and she said that her mommy had read the stories to her when she was little, from the very same book!

I wonder sometimes what the story would have been if I picked a different book.