Creating time travel timelines without pulling my hair out…
I’m not bald yet.
Yet.
I anticipated this process being hard. I’m not an outliner or a plotter really. I like to plot as I go. As long as I know the inciting incident of a story, the climax, and how it’s going to end, I’m golden. But for a time travel story with 5 different timelines that span several hundred years… Yeah, I expected it to be hard, but I could not have anticipated this level of hardness (insert dirty joke here…ya’ll are filthy. I like it:).
I am enjoying this story, though. Now that I know the basic “how it’s going to work”, the story is begging to be written. The goal is to have a finished draft by the end of September. I’m pretty sure I can do it.
Pretty sure…
I started The Canyon Edict for a flash fiction anthology several years ago, but circumstances forced me to pull it. I’ve wanted to work on a full length of this story for a long time, but I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around all that would be involved with it. One day about a month and a half ago, I took a nap and woke up and there it was! All 4 timelines! I didn’t decide to add the fifth timeline until I started working on the plot outline and realized I needed one more to fully tell the story.
As I write, I both rely on my outline and throw caution to the wind. I have to consult the outline to remember the order of things sometimes, but then, this is time travel. Not everything is going to be in order. So far, I’ve crossed two timelines. Intentionally. I’m 26.5 k words into a story that’s supposed to be cresting 40k today. I have a little catching up to do, but I can do it.
I can do it. I’ve made bigger comebacks than this.
This week I will be working on my editor’s notes for Bittersweet. Probably today to be honest. I need to make more notes on The Canyon Edict before I can move forward and I have a lot of edits to get through this month, both for me and for other people. But Bittersweet releases in a month and a half, so I’ve got to get things finished up so I can get the preorders up. It’s almost here, guys!
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