Nearing Completion

74, 245 words.

As the first draft of The Time Key nears completion I feel somewhat sad that my characters are finishing their journey that I had the privilege to go on and document for them. If only it could go on forever. . .

Meet you on the other side

The two hero’s are now approaching the wormhole with extreme apprehension as they have no idea what awaits them on the other side.

I had an epiphany: My multi-universe story should have multiple endings. (Explains why I saw so many ways to go.) I am deeply thrilled about this development as I get to spend extra time telling this never ending story!

Back to Earth?

Ah, my heroes are on their way back to Earth.

The only question remaining is will they make it back to their future lives or not? They've done all they can to try to prevent a time-split. Will it be enough? I hope to know soon...

Great Books

I have been reading everything I could get my hands on about the physical realms of our amazing universe. After this wonderful journey I now highly recommend the following books:

(1) The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

(2) The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

(3) Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos by Michio Kaku

(4) In Search of the Multiverse by John Gribbins

(5) The Cosmos by Carl Sagan

(6) A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

I also thoroughly enjoyed the personal diary of an astronaut that went to the moon in the 1960's. A better understanding of spaceship travel with a rocket ship can only help my writing! It is titled Carrying the Fire.

The moon and other muses

Fabulous writing day. And especially for my lovers in the novel, The Time Key. They got to spend their weekend at The Plaza hotel in New York celebrating. Kind of envy them, though writing about it was also a good experience. I highly recommend writing as a way to escape the bonds of our Earth. There was a very pretty, full moon hanging in the western sky on our way to work (school) this morning. In all my books the moon always plays a key part.

Lovers and other muses

Our heroine, Jazlyn Martin, Jaz for short, and our hero, Will J. Hugh, have fallen deeply in love. This is a wonderful time for a writer because the characters take over completely in their desire and lust and drive the story to new heights!!! I've found this pair of lovers to be quite different from others I have known. They first met in a "mind-meld" where they explored and found each others brains to be very much to their liking before the lust hit. Perhaps because this is a pair of scientists who value intelligence and research above all things. At least until they met . . .

Duality

I have decided as a surprise twist to my story that will keep my main hero, Will J. Hugh, around to love another day! You will also get to find out what happens to our second tier hero, Justin Kennedy, who is the main driver behind the book being a time travel novel. He's travelling to the past to try to save his wife from dying in a plane crash. I won't give the dual-endings away but both parts will hopefully satisfy the reader.

Computer cliches and deja vos

Very little time to write this past 24 hours as I got a brand new computer and the learning curve and setting everything up took all my attention. Hopefully, that part is completed now and I can get back to the business of writing, though I don't consider it a "business", but the way I keep my sanity!

I am wrestling with how the ending will unfold in my book. I'm considering a deja vos ending that loops back to the beginning, much like a closed time loop would do. Seems appropriate, it's just getting there in the best way that's challenging . . .

Characters and loss of control

As I stated yesterday, the characters in my novel now have the control! And it's becoming an even more exciting novel than I envisioned. This is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity. Things grow experientially and become so much more than their parts. I can hardly wait to see what else they have to teach me. I feel very blessed today, getting to take part in this journey.

Another thought:

Brian Greene was on Nova a couple of days ago discussing the "eternal inflation" theory of Alan Guth's for the universe. This theory says that new "Big Bangs" and new universes are popping up all the time! Hence multi-verses. This is quite different from the separate time-track approach my novel is taking where an event to the past creates a split in time, but very interesting nevertheless.
But if our hero from the novel gets inadvertently placed on a different time-track will he be able to find his love back in present day? Can I take that chance as a writer?

The RX-8 Rocket

What a great writing bonanza! 5000 plus words spilled out over the two days. The Time Key is now at 30,000 words in total. Things are really heating up and new possibilities are presenting themselves in unexpected ways which means the characters now have the control. In a matter of a few days there will be a test run of the RX-8 Atlantis rocket to the far side of the moon. Will the traversable wormhole be all the scientists have hoped for? This week should tell the tale. . .

Our incredible universe!

“You know what blows me away about our known universe. It’s how it’s so ideally suited for life as we know it. For example, if the protons in an atom were just 0.2 more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and decay into smaller particles. Atoms would not exist and neither would we! If gravity were just slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. It would cause stars to run through their fuel at a fraction of the time and sputter out before life as we know it had a chance to evolve. In other words, the universe is life-friendly. Too many coincidences to be mere accidents according to many scientists.”

Multiverse

*Multiverse: Brian Greene's topic on Nova last evening got me to thinking. Will the separate time track that is created by the split in the past caused by backward time travel actually be a different multiverse instead? If each one is supposedly 'curled up', will a new one uncurl from this planned intervention/tinkering with the past? The show suggested that a vast number of these multiverses exist, perhaps peopled with exact replicas of you and I, but maybe a different outcome is in the range of possibilities? Opens an amazing set of opportunities for a writer. . .

Starships

Been researching an appropriate "starship", using facts and figures from the Apollo 10, an American rocket. As my novel is set just slightly into the future, the RX-8 Atlantis as mine will be known, will have to travel at the subluminal speed of more than 25,000 miles an hour. (It would have to travel 2,000 times faster to travel at FTL or superluminal speed.)
And speaking of superluminal speed or faster than light, a classical rule of the Universe that Einstein thought could not be broken, once more the experiment at the Italian Apennines to the Gran Sasso lab proved to produce speeds in excess of the speed of light, a mind boggling fact. I think Einstein will be spinning in his grave!

The Fabric of Reality

The fabric of reality: Thinking of uni-verse versus multi-verse has invaded my thought processes to the point that last night's dream was of an Earth that had hidden layers beneath it's "carpet" of five inch foam, with another, brighter universe layered beneath it. Like the PBS special on Quantum Mechanics, by Brian Greene, the universe was portrayed as curled up (almost in a sphere) and yet infinite! Like Earth's mirror image or a split-universe.
Began writing before five am this morning and got a two hour bit of writing in. It was a love scene so I started off my day in a happy frame of mind! I highly recommend writing about romance, good for the spirit.

Wouldn't you love to change the past

My interest in time travel has come about because what if you could change the past? Save someone you loved? What kind of events would that set in motion for others. My scenario revolves around a plane crash and the idea of who's on standby to travel next, if the first person is kept from getting on. Who will die?

On an entirely different note: Watched a great special last evening on Quantum mechanics on Nova. Brian Greene really knows his stuff! Note to self, buy his book.

Macrocosm

My new heroine, Jazlyn Martin or Jaz to her friends, has as much an interest in time travel as I do! She works as a scientist for Macrocosm, a company that is researching possible theories for time travel. Very dedicated and hard working like most any scientist, Jaz is immediately captivated by the idea of travelling back in time to change an event for the better. But will the scientists' intervention to change the past actually succeed in doing that, or will it create a host of other problems for others? Only time will tell. . .

What an Amazing Journey!!!

What an amazing journey! The last three weeks spent on research is paying off big time. The story, based a few years into the future, poured out of me beginning at five AM each morning. I was able to connect many of the dots for writing proper science fiction in the time travel area, thanks to the scientists that take the idea seriously.
The rocket that takes one of my characters to the wormhole on the dark side of the moon (fortuitously mapped in February of this year), the RX-8 Atlantis, had already been invented before the incident in the past happened that is the basis for my story. This avoids one important paradox.
Now, the scientists in the novel are busy discussing ways to have this time travel to the past, 18 months before, happen. This will help my hoped-for-readers understand the ideas and concerns behind this amazing concept: time travel to the past!

NOVA

Seems every where I look of late there is a program on Nova or PBS about space and time travel. It is a fortuitous beginning for my adventure into plausible, past time travel possibilities. A character in my novel, The Time Key, wants to go back and fix the past. The only way imaginable I can gleam from all the ideas researched, is if he does this he will create a split in the universe due to his actions and create a second time track that he will be forever trapped on. But what about the fact that someone on the original time track will be deeply affected by this change? Will the original track change as well or does it have to stay the same right to the time we make a change by travelling back to the past?

"Splitting" Time...

One of my characters will be "splitting" time when he goes back to try to change the past, consequently causing much havoc to other's lives. This separate time-track will split space and change the present and the past and create a closed time loop. This brings up all kinds of issues that I look forward to working on shortly!

I have discovered that it is much harder to time travel to the past then to the future. So many more issues are involved. You begin to worry about such things as Time Police; that some unknown force will stop the passage as it is not allowed by the natural rules of our universe.
You begin to understand that space time in not intuitive--that most things that seem logical on Earth are not 'logical' in our galaxy. It's like learning to 'think' all over again and I could not be more fascinated. . .

Prologue to PLANET

One nation without boundaries: As human beings stretch skyward on highest tippy toe to swing for the brass ring of the second tier of the third level of the Kardashev scale for categorizing civilization, this dream has been finally realized for all peoples of Planet Earth. With disaster about to strike in the form of the Comet Titan, a massive ice-ball from the Kuiper belt, a zone just beyond Neptune that has sent a steady rain of comets eastward for thousands of years, all inhabitants are preparing to evacuate their home planet just behind an army of unleashed von Neumann probes, those self-replicating robots that are “seeding” the galaxy with terraform, that is, changing the new chosen planet’s surface and climate to be like Earths, for the Titan is coming. . .