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!