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Memories of the 28th Century

Writing about Writing

Rating: 5 votes, 5.00 average.
I was asked today when I would be posting to my blog again. Alas, I have been busy trying to get my novel into shape for publishing, so I confessed that and decided that I should start plugging my novel. When I last looked, it was about 93,000 words and formatted as a trade paperback came to about three hundred pages. The title will be “Harry’s Time Tours, Inc.” I had been thinking of it as Studies in Causation, but I have been having trouble remembering that title; although it might be a good title for the non-fiction version of this novel.

The book is mostly light hearted somewhat humorous retellings of some of the adventures that Harry and Mary have had and will have in running a time travel company. The novel is based on the premise of a man being transported from a world in which time travel is common into this world, where time travel is mostly a matter of speculative fiction. This leads to a variety of interesting situations, but I won’t spoil it by telling anything, except that one of the ways he finds to make money is to record music in the 1960’s and 1970’s and to take the recordings into the future beyond the limit of copyright and selling the recordings to a record company. There isn’t a huge amount of money in that, but it’s more fun than his day job as a computer programmer. To increase the income, he takes the proceeds back to about 1700 and deposits it in a bank that still exists. The interest rate isn’t all that high, but three hundred years of compounding interest turns it into a significant amount, and there are other benefits.

As is often the case with time travelers, there are problems, but he doesn’t encounter any of the traditional problems. But one of his first paying customers didn’t kill his grandfather, but that guy disappeared, and this guy married his grandmother.

Then there will be the matter of the Really Great Pandemic, but I won't describe that, because most of my readers will experience it first hand. It will be a win-win for survivors, so wait a few years and see how you fare.

They have investigated many crisis points in history; times when things went one way because of a specific event, such as the Battle of Manzikert, the Battle of Senlac, the Murder of Piere de Castelnau, and many more. Not all of these events are covered in this novel, but I expect to produce another volume at some point. Many of the stories do go into the matter of causation, but the events, rather than the understanding of them are the interesting matters. (Events named may not be in this book.)

People who have been reading the news recently will be happy to know that Trump was not important enough to make it into my novel. But there are much better characters. After being sad and lonely for a while, Harry met Mary, and they have remained an item for several hundred years. One person who read part of the novel said that she would love to meet the person that Mary is based on, but there no single person; although there are pieces of many individuals, and the same is true of Harry. He is a pleasant and interesting person, much more so than I am. I wish I'd been able to just transfer myself into the book. One of the characters was borrowed in concept, but that's how it is with characters. Words are copyrighted but ideas and characters are not.

A novel is different from non-fiction and not simply because it is fictional. I was just looking for something in descriptions of an author's works, and I was reminded that the work is personal; it holds something of the author, and it may have oddities for those reasons. There may be things in a novel that are included for reasons from outside the narrative. I hadn't known this until recently. Items might be added or excluded because it suits the author, rather than because it suits the story. Characters are prone to have characteristics like that. I write certain characters, because I like them, and there are others that I dislike, but I think I write them well anyway or even because my low opinion might show and become part of the characterization. There are other characters that I have trouble writing for various reasons, so I change them to something that I can write. Characters can take on a life of their own. That happened in a short story that I wrote a few years instead of writing the story that I intended.

Thinking and writing about writing are good, and the same is true about writing about thinking, and that's what this novel started out as. Over time it evolved from a philosophical thing into a story than has some interesting characters and events. I hope that people will read the novel and enjoy it, and some may even learn something form it.

Updated 02-05-2017 at 09:37 PM by PeterL

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