You have no idea how many time travelers I’ve met…
That sounds like a joke, but over the last twenty years, I’ve met and lived with too many time travelers.
So when somebody says “where do you get your crazy ideas?”, in this instance, no matter how insane it sounds, it’s a case of ‘write what you know’.
“How many time travelers could you possibly know?” you ask.
Well, I dated two of them. I refer to them in conversation as my ‘time traveling girlfriends’, which invariably leads to a hilarious and entirely true half-hour monologue about them, that essentially functions as a one-on-one standup routine. Ask me about it sometime when you have thirty minutes to kill.
I lived with a male time traveler for the best part of a year. He was also an alien from “the galaxy of Pleiades”. I once Googled it and tried to tell him that Pleiades is a cluster of stars, not an actual galaxy and he told me our “feeble earth-telescopes can’t tell a galaxy from a gleeblewort”. I think I just shrugged and left the room without inquiring further.
There are more self-proclaimed time travelers I’ve met, but the stories aren’t as interesting or memorable, so let’s move on.
At some point, I started to write a list of things I disliked about time travelers. None of them seemed to do the washing up, they all had an element of open sexual promiscuity about them and liked to make you watch (even the girlfriends…), and the list goes on… I decided to try and turn the list into a series, a serialized comedy with some anthology elements, but nobody was interested in buying it.
Cut to years later when I meet an enchanting, magnificent woman and decide to turn it into a book, basing the love interest on her. I believe the first draft was written on a two-week vacation in Spain with thirty-some of the most wonderful people I know.
Then it sat in a drawer for a bit.
And then I thought about self-publishing it, and accidentally hit ‘publish’ before it was ready to go, and swiftly attempted to kill it from the internet.
And *then* the relationship ended because the woman turned into someone completely different, and it went back in a drawer.
That is until this whole ABAM project reared its head, and I decided to see how it worked as a novella. Turns out, it’s got the same opening narration vibes that Dead City has… but let’s ignore that I’ve got a crutch I lean on. Also let’s ignore that sometimes in winter I have a literal crutch to lean on, because one of my knees hates the cold.
What is also interesting about this book, is that just as with the previous comedy BAM, it also features a guy talking to/with a version of himself… I’ve made reference in the past that part of my story-breaking process these days is to literally have back-and-forth conversations with myself out loud, as if I were still in a writer’s room. It’s only these two BAMs that are likely going to explore the fractured/split personality tightrope line that I walk, and other than that, the stories are very different. But it’s an interesting observation nonetheless, and I figure I should bring it up before anyone else points it out.
So what’s the advice I can give you at the end of this ramble?
Write what you know, I guess. And then take it far away from what you know into new and beautiful concepts. And also if someone tells you they’re a time traveler, give them five minutes of your time for a good story, but never move in with them, because they’re a lot of hard fucking work.
I am still awful at advice.
Oh look, there’s a link to get a super-cheap copy of next month’s book!
(I am much better at diversions)
‘I Hate Time Travelers’ Kindle edition – Pre-Order discount: $2.99 99c!
See you next time.