Our hero pays a visit to his sister for a progress report, and ends up in a place that was as surprising to the author as it was to the character. Read on… Observational blinks alternate between being up high, down low, or (almost) just right to keep things interesting. I tried to fit in…
Category: Behind the Scenes
Commentary 9: Drivin’ On 9
Everything before this was setup and foreshadowing. In this chapter we finally kick off the mission that will be the focus of the main story. Other tidbits: I really liked the idea of placing the sister’s death on 9/11 by pure coincidence, as I’m sure there were other real life passings overshadowed by the gravity…
Commentary 8: Eight Days A Week
For some reason I’m drawing a complete blank in trying to write an introduction to the commentary for this chapter, so I guess I’ll just jump right in with the tidbits. I’ve always been partial to the brilliant simplicity of “and/or” when I write. Surprisingly it only shows up three times in the final draft,…
Commentary 7.5: Seven and a Half Cents
Changing things up today, I thought it would be interesting to dissect the longest deleted chapter since we’re at the point in the book where it would have appeared. I’m also hoping that a baseball post will help snap the Red Sox losing streak 🙂 As I’ve said before, this was intended to set up…
Commentary 7: Tram #7 To Heaven
If memory serves, I think this was the first chapter written in Luxembourg using Jon Mack’s laptop. I spent 8 weeks in Lux; taking the first week off to get acclimated, writing every weekday for 6 weeks, then taking the last week off to celebrate the first draft. So it’s somewhat fitting that chapter 7…
Commentary 6: 6ix
Back at the bowling alley in search of answers, our hero confronts the old man. This chapter is exposition heavy on early time travel nuts and bolts, and one I struggled with most in rewrites. The idea was to set a foundation that would have some parts hold true and other parts be called out…
Commentary 5: Five Seconds to Hold You
Although Timely Persuasion has a science fiction premise, I really wanted to ground the story in reality as much as possible outside of the time travel. Thus I knew I wanted to send the narrator back to save Kurt Cobain, but I also knew that his mission would ultimately have to fail. The physics of…
Commentary 4: Four Hours In Washington
Going back in time to save Kurt Cobain was one of the first inspirations I had while brainstorming. This chapter sends the narrator to Seattle with this goal in mind, while the underlying narrative purpose is really to flesh out his musical background and further along his time travel discovery process. It’s a sort of…
Commentary 3: Gimme Three Steps
This is the first of many introspective/exploratory chapters where the narrator is trying to piece together exactly what is happening to him. High on stream of consciousness, low on dialogue. I’ve always hated writing dialogue, which is probably one of the many reasons I abandoned my screenwriting training and wrote a novel instead. Most of…
Commentary 2: Two Of Us
A bowling league felt like a neat place to kick off the journey and was a setting I hadn’t seen explored in literature before. It also allowed me to include a few nods to bowlers and teams I had encountered over the course of my short semi-recreational league bowling career. Once Bowlingus got his nickname…