I Keep Falling Out of Time

As I said last time, I'm going to talk some more about time travel. Because I love it. What does this have to do with upcoming Camp NaNo? Probably nothing. And that's okay.

Here's my experience with time travel. I've written two time travel stories. I think. I can only thing of two. I have Unknown Soldier (first written as a short story in 2008, then as a screenplay in 2011), and A Matter of Time (my first NaNo from 2010).

Unknown Soldier was pretty straightforward. It was a loop. Essentially, our protagonist heard a story about a mysterious guy who did a heroic thing. This inspires him to try to be heroic. He volunteers for an experimental program to test, you guessed it, a time machine.

So Close, So Far, I'm Lost in Time

Time travel.

It's one of my favorite subjects. It opens up all kinds of possibilities for stories that cross multiple time periods. It can be done really well, or really not.

There are options when it comes to time travel. You have two main types:

• Loops
• Branches

Loops are different from time loops, in which a period of time keeps repeating. Rather, I mean the kind of thing where someone went back in time and did a thing, but that doesn't change the future, because they always went back to do that thing. Like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The bit with the patronus at the lake or whatever.

Branches are when they go back and change something, and they divert events onto a different path, resulting in a future different from the one they left. Like Back to the Future. School dances and sports almanacking lead to changes in the timeline.

The In-Between

I love liminal spaces. You probably know that by now. Those places between other places. The thresholds. The doorways. Places neither here nor there. That moment between today and tomorrow.

Somehow or another I found myself reading about hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, that is, the transitional periods of falling asleep and waking up, respectively.  Essentially, your brain doesn't always go smoothly from one to the other. It gets a little murky and mixed up, and gives you this liminal state between the two. And then I read about false awakening, where you think you've woken up, but you're still dreaming. The whole dream within a dream thing.

Me being me, I take some run of the mill mental phenomenon, and ask myself what kind of adventures could this lead to. I mean, a doorway's a doorway. Not just a link between asleep and awake, but maybe also a link to somewhere else. I've mentioned hypnic jerks before, that twitch when you're on the verge of sleep, like you've nearly fallen and caught yourself. But where were you falling to?

Will the Plot Ever Twist or Will I Still Resist?

I have so much to do for my next project, and only about two weeks to do it. It feels like such a big undertaking and I don't where to begin.

I need characters.

I need a setting

I need a plot.

You can see the problem. I mean, sure, I have some vague ideas. But it's a far cry from an actual outline.

But we're not going to talk about my shortcomings. Not those shortcomings, anyway. No, we're going to talk about a vital piece of plot that I've never really managed to use.

The Plot Twist.

The Shape of Tales to Come

Well, the next prompt in line is to describe the view out my window, and… it's dark. So we'll hold off on that for now. Where does that leave us then? Besides in the dark.

Right here, digging through my stored up stuff. In the dark.

A Simulacrum of Sense

Sometimes it's not about what you say. It's about what you might have said.

Cryptic, no?

There's a site that someone linked on Facebook forever ago (and then moved on from like a normal person) that takes your past posts, and jumbles them up to give you something that sounds like something you'd say. I have it bookmarked. Every so often, I'll go there, and save the best ones.

It Gets Funnier Every Time

I think things are stagnating a little with the constant "I don't know what this story is about." So we're going to talk about something different today. I actually wrote a whole post about lines and bits of dialogue I've collected, but I've had way too much coffee, and it really doesn't make any sense. So we're going to try this again.

Looking through all my collected stuff… how about running gags? Those are fun. If you're not aware, a running gag is some amusing thing that keeps popping up. It's Family Guy's giant chicken, Avatar: The Last Airbender's "My cabbages!", and basically all of Arrested Development.

Look At This Stuff, Isn't It Neat?

After careful consideration, I have determined that I will not be rewriting The Midnight Circus for July's Camp NaNo, or possibly ever. The general consensus on that was "write an entirely different story." So I will. I'm not going to waste my time trying to fix a story that no one would ever want to read. So now I have to figure out what to write in its place.

I have a partial story about a guy who can see the future that I could finish. I could try to rewrite any number of my old novels. There's one currently on draft three that I could try to figure out.

On my quest through all my story ideas today, I came upon my list of McGuffins. A McGuffin is a thing, that you probably want. Maybe it’s a thing that does something. That's real clear, right? It's the One Ring. It’s Dorothy's ruby slippers. It's the Holy Grail, and that suitcase from Pulp Fiction. It's either the cause of, or the solution to, all your problems. Maybe both.

Anyway, I have some great McGuffins on the list I have assembled from the NaNo forums. I'd like to share some with you. Maybe one of them will play a vital role in my next story.

• A desk that seems to swallow anything (or anyone) who spends too much time around it.
• A map that shows the location of something that you want the least.
• A tiny, metal puzzle box that is impossible to solve.
• A large, old book that doesn't open, and occasionally drips salt water from between its pages.
• A weather vane in the shape of a rooster that comes to life on the 14th of every month.
• A broken music box, which plays distorted and ethereal notes to a nursery rhyme tune.

Can you imagine a story around one of these things? Or a story involving all of them? Maybe it's time for me to write a delightfully weird fantasy/supernatural type story. Maybe that's what I should do for July.

What do you think? Any of my McGuffins stand out to you? Or might you suggest some of your own? Let's get collaborative in here.

I think we might be on the right track with this. These particular items and their odd style evoke a feeling I'm not sure I can explain. It's like… sliding sideways into a sunny room. It’s summer, twenty years ago, maybe. There's no way in hell anyone's going to understand that. I've got a good feeling about it, is what I'm trying to say.

So please, comment and tell me what you think. I don’t care if it's on here, or on Facebook. I'd just really like to hear your thoughts. All of you.

See you Friday.

Breaking Blocks

I'm going to be honest, I haven't written anything super exciting. That's the problem of having a word goal of only 10,000. That means the daily quota is only 334. So we're not exactly flying through this. I did write some dialogue that I liked, but I don't think it stands on its own very well.

So I guess we're going to talk about writer's block today. I wouldn't say that I'm blocked, really, but I don't really know what happens next. Luckily, I have a whole pile of things to deal with just that. As Municipal Liaison for NaNo, I like to provide all kinds of helpful stuff for my NaNoites. I have two bags of little paper slips that I take to write-ins.

One is labeled Scene Unstickers. These are random events that can happen to get a scene moving, such as:

• A fire breaks out
• Someone makes a confession
• Someone is running late
• Two words: Tequila shots
• Someone DIES!

The other is the Big Bag of Steves. It involves the many misadventures of a guy named Steve (there's a story there I'll eventually explain). These include:

• Steve shops for kiwis out of season
• Steve doesn't look where he's going
• Steve doesn't think it's poisonous
• Steve calls everyone by the wrong name
• Steve wants to invade the North Pole

The idea is that you draw one of these out of the bag, and try to steer your story toward making that thing happen. This might not be the best part of your story, but the idea is to get the story moving and the words flowing. Hopefully this random thing will lead to other things.

As for my story, The Shattered World, some random thing needs to happen right now, to get things moving. So later today I'll probably be diving into my stash of inspirational tidbits, and we'll see where it goes from there. Hopefully by Friday I'll have something more exciting to report.

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