This post features my story The TimeWarp Bill
Newly reprinted by The Fast-Forward Festival
Spoilers have been whited out
Exciting news! The TimeWarp Bill, originally published by Spaceports and Spidersilk in April 2013, is now also a part of the delightful webzine The Fast-Forward Festival! You can read if here if you’re interested 🙂 Also, if you found my blog after reading the story, then welcome to my internet playground!
So, in honor of the reprinting of this story, I’m posting 8 bits of trivia about the story / characters / writing process. Spoilers have been whited out between these [[ Greetings! ]]. Highlight between the brackets to read them.
1. So far, this has been my only story in which my two main characters don’t have a names. The main character is Matt, and the guy you meet later on is Andrew (he goes by AJ) but I just couldn’t find a way to gracefully insert that information into the story without sounding forced.
2. The idea formed from daydreaming about the phrase “It’s been a long year” and wondering if I could take those words literally.
3. AJ wasn’t part of my original draft of the story. Instead, Matt had a conversation with a girl in the study hall who had different opinions on TimeWarp. After a nice stack of rejections, I decided to take the story back to brainstorming. Here’s a piece of the conversation I had with my alter ego on the subject:
“So what do you like about it?” Hannah asked. “Why keep the project at all?”
“I like the idea of TimeWarp.”
Hannah snorted, “Yeah, because no one’s ever thought of stopping time before. Come on: what else?”
I chewed my lip for a moment. “I guess maybe the way Time Warp is presented. Casual. Commonplace. And, yeah, that’s not blow-your-mind original either, but it was fun to write about.”
“All right. So, it’s fun,” Hannah circled her fingers in a ‘keep going’ gesture. “So, draw the plot closer to the idea. Show them using TimeWarp.”
I nodded, thinking back to the story and how the title feature is never properly displayed. “Okay. So he stops time. Then what?”
Hannah raised an eyebrow at me as she bit the corner off a Popsicle. “I’m not going to do your job for you, Liv. You tell me.”
“He… witnesses something happening in the school?”
“Nah,” she shook her head. “That’s opening a door more than closing one.”
“He breaks the TimeWarp device and gets stuck?”
“Not with the time rules you already established.”
“He meets someone?” I tried, and she didn’t continue with her traditional idea whack-a-mole. “Okay, so he meets someone,” I decided with more authority. “Now what?”
4. [[ After the story ended, Matt kept AJ’s little red ball for the rest of his life. ]]
5. Matt was indeed grounded when his parents saw the bill, but they only enforced it for the first few months because Matt showed some dramatic improvement in school.
6. I am ridiculously bad at jacks.
7. I would totally have been the kid who says “I don’t have TimeWarp.” I didn’t even have a cell phone until my last year of college.
8. [[ I like to believe that AJ gets back into normal time eventually. I honestly haven’t looked into the topic, because if I discover he doesn’t get out I’ll just be depressed. Still, technology gets better all the time. I’m sure someone finds a way to free him in the future. (I hope… AJ’s a sweetie…) ]]
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Thanks for reading 🙂 If anyone has any comments / questions about the story, we all know how I love rambling about my characters, so please ask!