I feel like A Writer today!

That might sound strange, but I know some people will understand what I mean. Right now, I'm penning In An Ageless Sky - my Great Tea Debacle competition novel. In this story I'm touching on the time travel issues I mentioned further down this blog, like, last month or something.

That's not to say this is a time-travel story by any means, but the act of traveling through time and "changing" past events to alter future ones does come into play. I have this amazing clarity of mind about the whole issue, too, for the first time in my life I UNDERSTAND how time travel could (although of course it doesn't) function and exactly how (although it doesn't) change would affect everyone involved.

I'm so friggin' psyched about it all. Like that moment you're reading Einstein's Theory of Relativity and suddenly, brilliantly, it all makes sense.

Based on that revelation, and this theory of mine, I've had yet another - completely independent yet equally thrilling - novel idea come into mind. I'll be writing that one next, after this novel is done.

And I've purchased a notebook. The spiral kind, with 200 pages in it. I'm going to handwrite my next novel, re-teach my right hand how to hold a pen and develop the stamina to do so.

I can't even begin to tell you how happy that thought makes me. It recalls the days of my youth, sitting on the bed late at night, with a notebook and pen, frantically (because the ideas were flowing so freely from my young brain) trying to get each sentence written before the next one could stammer out. Stopping only when I was dozing on the page, or my hand was cramped beyond function.

My face would be so close to the notebook, I could smell the ink and would fall asleep with that scent creeping into my nostrils. I loved the feel of paper, like the old books with the cracked spines - how they smelled !

I feel giddy, like a school girl, with thoughts of this novel and the next - - the pure joy of falling so completely into these worlds that they spring to life around me, as real as the one I'm sitting in right now.

I feel like A Writer.

Oh, um . . .yeah . . . You'll all fail. Give up now, yada yada.

Mail me your tea.

What the -- ?

Who, What, Why and Where. Writers often use the What If tactic to either come up with a plot, fix a plot, figure out a plot, or plug up a plot.

I do it now and again just to amuse myself, but I'll also utilize it for working out a plot when I need to know the best way to get from point B to point C. And it's a good tool for checking over your novel when it's completed - asking yourself some questions to see if you've left anything open and dangling in the realm of stupidity that your agent/publisher/readers will catch.

The question that I've been pondering lately involves time travel, which usually makes me roll my eyes because too many writers (books, movies, and tv) really screw it up. But my question is: What if those predictions from the 50's were true, and by the year 2007 we're all flying around in our personal hovercrafts, leaving the household chores to our robots, working two days a week from the comfort of our home offices, using our virtual reality computers, and taking long vacations on a resort on Mars?

What if all that were true, and a reality, only someone from the future invented a time machine, traveled back into the past on a lark, and stepped on a butterfly. And thanks to that hapless twit, we have the reality we live in now - which is technically an alternate, someone-screwed-up-and-changed-it reality. We're completely oblivious to this until that hapless twit shows up and apologizes for having fucked us over and set the human race back about a thousand years.

The consequences of that question are explored to a certain degree in my new novel - the one I'm competing with in the Great Tea debacle.

Now, I know what you're saying: If this guy from the future travels to the past and changes the future, wouldn't that cancel out his own existence, thus making it impossible for him to travel to the past in the first place? That's called a time loop, which is solved by the parallel universe theory.

Let's imagine Fred, Barney, Wilma and Betty are standing in Fred's basement, watching as Fred steps into a time machine. He goes "poof" and heads into the past. While he's there, he steps on the proverbial butterfly, thus causing dear old Betty to never have been born. When he returns to the present, he finds Barney and Wilma waiting for him, anxious to hear about his adventure - but no Betty.

Fred stepped on the butterfly, Betty was never born. Fred remembers Betty, realizes what he did - but Barney and Wilma have never heard of Betty. She was never born, so they don't know she's gone.

You're thinking - But, if Betty was never born, then she never married Barney, who then never took that job at the rock quarry, never met Fred, and wasn't there to help him build the time machine in the first place.

Now instead of following Fred, let's stay with Barney, Betty and Wilma. They wave as Fred goes 'poof' then stand there, chatting and enjoying the cheese platter, and wait. Fred has now squashed said butterfly. Does Betty puff out of existence? Does she vanish, leaving Wilma and Barney with a serious case of amnesia? What happened to her wine glass? Did it fall to the floor?

No. What happened was, Betty, Barney and Wilma are left to wait forever - because Fred never returns.

The reality Fred is alive in is the one where the butterfly died, and Betty wasn't born. So that's the only reality Fred can return to.

The reality Wilma, Barney and Betty are alive in is the one where Fred left in a time machine and never came back.

So, could the Terminator have traveled back in time and murdered Sara Conner - thus preventing her son from being born, which would have eliminated the Terminator from ever having to travel back in the first place?

Yes and No. He would have traveled back, killed Sara, and prevented the kid from being born - but that would not have affected the people who sent him. It would have created an alternate reality, wherein Sara Conner was murdered before ever having a son.

Dizzy?

Don't worry - when I go back and spray Raid all over the Jurassic and prevent your birth, it'll only be a reality somewhere else, which is where I'll be, which kinda makes it a win-win for me, eh? :D