ALL MY STORIES ARE ABOUT TIME

What if we are not the result of a linear past?

Are both our future and past fixed?

One way or another, I find myself picking a pen (or pencil) and writing about time. And make drawings connected with time, some of which would end up being plans for new writing.

I have subtitled my recent novel, Fences of The Light, as “A novel about time.” That came to be because time isn’t in the main title, and “about time” is a popular search term in the region that includes “time machine” and “time travel.” My three novels had a time travel component, whether suggested or happening around the main storyline. Using this theme, I can discuss what interests me, the connections between time, fate, and our sense of humanity.

Perhaps confirming that I only have one idea hammer, I consider that all fiction is, in some way, stories about time.

Literary fiction tells us a story about what time has done to us, and

Genre fiction creates a situation that tests what we can do with the time we are given. The time left, let’s say, before the nuclear weapon goes off.

Basically, when the present isn’t all that crucial to surviving, we see the long stretches of time before the now and how we are a result of their passing. To me, a lot of literary fiction resembles an unreliable memoir.

But in my writings, I pursue another possibility. A perpendicular dimension of time, if you may. What if we are not the result of a linear past? And what if we could get to know the future? Are both our future and past fixed?

Concepts like fate or destiny assume a particular order to events, including future ones. Perhaps the future is fixed just like the past—highlighting the idea of predestination or fate. Or perhaps not.

In my first novel, The Sound of a Broken Chain , a message from the future tells the main character, Edgar, that one of his future actions will cause a great deal of trouble. But the messenger doesn’t know which specific action Edgar should change. Not knowing what needs fixing makes him agonize about each decision during a very trying period, when lives are at stake. He doubts everything, even his own reality and the value of his life.

You see, I am not all that interested in the actual traveling through time of my stories. But I do care about the consequences of us getting to do it. My stories usually begin or end with someone traveling through time, never during the actual story.

I am not inclined to obsess over the mechanisms of time travel or potential time paradoxes. But my new book, Fences of The Light, provides a novel way to travel through time … maybe you would like to buy one of those new De Loreans.

On Fences of The Light, an impending time travel event looms over the protagonist and increases tension as the story progresses. It erases his concept of a true future for him and destroys the promise of a simple life he’s been trying to build for years. His present gets scrambled, because knowing that you have had another life and loved another someone in your past (that is, at this point, your future) doesn’t make it simple to live every day.

I am convinced that wondering about the nature of time and its effects on how we live our lives can lead to new types of stories. I will let you know about the next one as it takes shape.