Author Life Musings: Accidental Time Travel

I was just chatting with some fellow authors about how easy it is to run into timeline problems while writing. This is a big problem for me. In early drafts, and occasionally even in the draft that goes to my editor, characters frequently find themselves arriving at their destination the day before they left. I like to call this accidental time travel! Thankfully, I do a lot of editing myself, along with handing off my stories to professional editors who can set my accidental time travel adventures back on the right path, in the right direction… time-wise.

However, this accidental time travel made me think about the idea of time travel in real life. I often reminisce about the past. Most of us do. For me, this also plays a part in my writing. Experiences from my childhood, or even things that happened in recent weeks, have played a part in what I write and have inspired many a quirky character moment. The past and the time we spend there have a direct impact on today and the choices we make. They say time travel is a thing of fiction, but I believe, in a way, it’s less fictional than we think. The past can be revisited whenever we want, and what we revisit there often changes our future. Memories are often not accurate, but they are as close as we can get to real-life time travel…or so we think.

What’s a memory that you often revisit that has changed your “future”?