Why Time Travel?

First of all, I feel like I say this all the time, but only because it's true:

I didn't set out to be a Time Travel Author, but here we are. After following through on a Twitter joke, I now have not one but two stories that feature time travel. One is a novel that will be written in the future (I'm still discovering more about it every day); the other is a short story that will soon be my first published writing. I'll share more of that story soon.

As soon as I dipped my toes in the water of time travel fiction, I couldn't stop myself from jumping right in to see where the current took me. The Twitter joke turned into an emotional story about a girl going back in time to meet her dad, who left her family when she was a baby. The time travel device gave me the freedom to let the story go anywhere (or more importantly, anywhen) -- when I discovered a scene where 13-year-old Hannah is playing baseball with her dad, who also happens to be 13 at the time, I realized the magic that time travel stories can create. 

When I was 13, I played baseball with my friends too (but not with my daughter time traveling from the future, at least as far as I know), and sometimes there would be close plays. We didn't have umpires -- heck, we didn't have bases most of the time, so arguing about whether someone's foot touched the base before the ball hit the glove could get messy. Sometimes one side would give up in the face of a louder or bigger kid's opinion, but sometimes both sides stood their ground, and we had no choice but to call for a do-over. 

We'd rewind time for thirty seconds or so, and reset from right before the controversial play. We'd all check in with each other to make sure we arrived at the same moment in time: it's a 2-1 count with one out and a runner on second, and Timmy just stepped back on the mound after answering his mom's call (ten minutes until dinner's ready!) from across the yard.

Time travel. I've been doing it my whole life. 

I love stories about do-overs: second (or third or fourth) chances, rewriting history, getting the Infinity Stones first so The Snap never happened in the first place. 

I love reading them, I love watching them, and now I love writing them. 

My only regret is that I didn't start sooner.

Maybe I can get a do-over?