Last summer, I started responding to daily #TimeTravelAuthors posts on Twitter, sharing snippets and details from a book I hadn't written yet. I thought it might help me develop a story, or at worst be a not-very-funny joke that would disappear into the ethereal nothingness of the Internet.
The first post was a simple introduction with an explanation of what I was going to do (or what I had already done in the future), and a promise that things would get weird.
Spoiler alert: things got weird.
The next day, the prompt asked for a single line from your book. I imagined myself looking into the future, holding my book in my hand, and flipping it open to a random page. Here's the line I saw and shared:
Hannah ran, her feet splashing in the rising puddles, but she knew it was too late.
I didn't know what that meant then, and I still don't know now. I don't know why the puddles are rising (or even if puddles rise), and I don't know what she's too late for.
But I do know this sentence will appear on a random page in SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN whenever future me writes it, and I'm confident that I'll have figured it out by then.
Oh, that title -- I discovered that a little over a month in, when the daily prompt asked for the title of your book, and I had to time travel to find out what future me had decided to call it.
Around the same time, one of the other authors participating, one of the ones who had actually written a book already, sent a message to some of the other authors, including the one who was just making this all up (that's me). Who's interested in a crazy idea? he asked.
As you can probably guess by now, I'm a sucker for a crazy idea.
He wanted to see if we were interested in contributing a short story to a new anthology of time travel fiction. I was definitely interested, and this time the fact that I hadn't written anything yet wasn't a problem.
That was in September. Today is December 8th, and my story BLUE SKIES is available to purchase for e-readers as part of the anthology The Accidental Time Traveler Collective. It's my debut as a published author, and I still can't quite believe this all happened so fast.
But then, I guess time is relative when we're talking about time travel stories.
