Resolutions

Happy New Year!

I posted a few goals for 2025 on Bluesky and Twitter as 2024 came to an end the other day, and I wanted to put them out into the universe here too. 

The biggest one is publishing THE FIRST KID ON MARS with Big Sea Books. This is the story that brought me back to writing for the first time since I was a kid, and it's the story that my kid fell in love with as I was writing it. I'll be editing/revising this spring, and the plan is to publish it by the end of the school year. 

I've only been able to write a little bit of SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN in the present so far - the rest exists only in my imagined future. I'm planning to catch up to that future this year, with a full first draft complete before the calendar flips again.

With three published short stories (BLUE SKIES and FROM NOW ON in The Accidental Time Travelers Collective Vol. 1 and Vol. 3, respectively, and DAY TEN in the first issue of Bunker Squirrel Magazine), I'm starting to feel like a real writer. I've got two more ready to publish this year (BLIND LUCK and (almost) out of the woods), and a whole bunch more in the works. How many can I get published this year?

Speaking of Bunker Squirrel Magazine, I'm planning to submit a flash fiction piece based on their prompts every month. You should too - it's run by great people, and it's putting some great writing out into the world. 

I want to write more haiku this year. Lots and lots and lots of haiku. I gave my parents a @haikuformykids calendar, and maybe it's time to start selling them somewhere. 

And finally, I want to blog more regularly. I guess I can check that off my list.

For today, anyway.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

 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. 

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? 

What's in a Name?

A few days ago, someone told me that I always have "snappy" titles for my stories. I felt some pride, but also a lot of humble gratitude for what I see as a lucky streak of stumbling into a title. 

It got me thinking: where do these titles come from? How did I get lucky with snappy ones? Here's a quick run-down...

THE FIRST KID ON MARS

• This is the story that brought me back to writing (a story that I still need to tell here), and the title fell out of the sky halfway through chapter one. All I knew at first was that there was a young girl in a classroom. When the principal called from the office, I found out that the girl, Abby, had been picked for a mission that would make her the first kid on Mars. I did a quick google search to make sure no one else had already used that title, and that was it. 

SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN

• This story started out as a Twitter joke and took on a life of its own; I discovered new details about it every day, and about a month in I discovered that the 2016 World Series was an important event for the main characters. The 2016 World Series finished with a dramatic rain delay in the 9th inning of a tied game 7. Nobody knows exactly what happened in the locker rooms, but after seventeen minutes of rain the Cubs came out to rally for the win.

BLUE SKIES

• I was invited to contribute a short story to an anthology of time travel authors (I still can't believe this really happened), and jumped into a story that starts with a skydiving accident and time hops to 2142 and back, so a dad can help his daughter save the world. I looked up skydiving lingo and found "blue skies" - a phrase that can mean hello, goodbye, and good luck in the skydiving community. And then it matched up with the lullaby dad used to sing to his little girl, so it had to be the title.

LOOKING FOR KISMET

• I saw a book on a table at the school I teach at, part of a messy pile of books next to a note that said "FREE!" The title of the book grabbed me - Searching for Serendipity - but I didn't grab the book. I did let that phrase kick around in my head for a few days, until it was joined by memories of my old cat Kismet, and an imagined story of neighborhood kids looking for Kismet when she runs away. 

Looking at this list, I guess I do feel like I've gotten pretty lucky with snappy titles. Any other name might not smell so sweet.

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!