I haven't really written in a few months. I've been kind of out of it.
But I've had an idea rattling around in my brain for a while, and decided to finally start some work on it, even if just a little bit.
So, I'll be doing #WritingWonders again in April with this short story/novella (not sure how long it'll be yet).
It's untitled as of yet, but it's a retelling of Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy is a time traveler.
Day 1. Intro Tell two truths and one lie about your story.
- Scarecrow will be an AI who wants real human intelligence.
- Toto will be a Samoyed.
- Dorothy will be a PhD student at MIT researching quantum wormholes.
#WritingWonders #DayTwo : What's the education system like in your world?
The story starts out in the present day, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
So, that's a pretty good education.
But, Dorothy is brilliant, and managed to get a full-ride scholarship. Most people are not that lucky. Even many people as brilliant as her can't manage to afford an education as good as hers.
Dorothy actually doesn't realize this, but she has kind of a guardian angel who has been helping her by making sure the right people know about her. Without this person secretly looking out for her, she wouldn't have had nearly the same opportunities. She would have eventually done okay, but it would've taken longer, and she would've missed out on some opportunities.
In the future world, to which she travels, education is much less formal. Some people are lucky to meet teachers and gain an education. Many just eek out an existence best they can.
#WritingWonders #DayThree : If your MC had a wanted poster, what info would be on it?
Here's the poster.
Note: the photo was generated by Dall-E. I put together the poster with Adobe Express.
Caption
Poster: "Wanted. For the murder of the Warlord of East Oz. Reward on return to the Wester Witch. Dead or Alive. Dorothy Gale. In the company of a small dog." The photograph is a biracial woman with curly hair, staring straigh forward, wearing overalls over a plain white t-shirt.
@danjones000 I love, "In the company of a small dog." 😃
@danjones000 This turned out amazing 😊
Thank you so much! I appreciate it.
#WritingWonders #DayFour : MC POV: If you could teach one subject, what would it be?
Well, physics, obviously. I'm already teaching undergrad physics classes.
That can get a little awkward sometimes, to be honest. Since I'm so much younger than the other grad students. It's happened on more than one occasion when a professor will walk into a class I'm teaching, and ask where the teacher is. 
I guess, if I could teach one subject, to be honest, it would just be nothing. But my program requires it of me.
#WritingWonders #DayFive : On a typical day, what sounds does your MC hear after they wake up?
Most days, after her alarm clock goes off, she'll hear her Boston terrier, Toto, yawn, and stretch.
Some days, she'll hear the garbage truck rumble past her apartment building.
During our story, however, the sounds of the distant future are very different, and vary depending on what part of her journey she's on.
#WritingWonders #DaySix : What is your MC's morning routine like?
Dorothy starts off the day with breakfast, while reading the latest issue of Quantum Magazine, or Peter Woit's blog, Not Even Wrong.
She'll then go for a run with Toto. She's always tried to keep herself fit. When you're thirteen years old and might need to run away from an abusive step-parent, being physically fit can help you get away faster.
After a quick shower, and dressing in whatever clean (or at least not smelly) thing she can find, she catches the red line to campus.
During her travels in the future, however, her mornings are a bit different.
They usually have to find some breakfast first. Leo is pretty good at hunting down some small animals or something.
Sometimes, she might be lucky enough to find someplace to bathe.
But really, it's a different thing every day.
#WritingWonders #DaySeven : Name one sound and one scent that occurs in your MC's worst nightmare.
At thirteen, Dorothy was briefly sent to a new foster family: the Von Liebermans.
One evening, about a week after she was sent there, Mr. Von Lieberman stumbled into her room, drunk.
She could smell his breath a foot from her bed.
"You're a pretty little thing, aren't you?"
Before he had a chance to actually touch her, she kneed him in the groin, grabbed her bag, and left. She was picked up a couple days later and sent to a group home.
But sometimes, when she lets herself feel weak, she hears the shuffling of his feet, and smells the alcohol wafting through the air.
#WritingWonders #DayEight : MC POV: What is something you never leave home without?
Maybe not never, but very rarely do I go anywhere without Toto.
He's been with me since I was fifteen, and he was the first real family I've had since my mom died when I was ten.
Sure, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry had been taking care of me for almost a year by then, but they took me in out of a sense of obligation, not because of any actual affection. They were nice, and treated me well, but they didn't really feel like family.
So, I take Toto with me wherever I can. I don't like being away from him.
It took a while to train him, but he's gotten pretty good at staying quiet when he needs to. I can take him to the lab, or a class, and he sits under a desk and nobody notices.
Catching up on #WritingWonders #DayNine
Describe your MC’s style as if in a fashion magazine.
Dorothy is sporting a simple, yet chic ensemble. She exudes a confident aura the complements her understated outfit perfectly.
Her plain white T-shirt hangs loosely, while the crew neckline elongates her neck, drawing attention gentle jawline.
Completing the outfit is a pair of sleek overalls, its denim material adding a touch of texture to her look.
She pairs her ensemble with a pair of comfortable, yet sturdy sneakers. She is ready for anything that may come her way.
Name one unusual thing in your MC’s home.
Her home is very understated. She's never been able to settle down in one place very long.
The one thing that most people don't have is her go bag. She's always ready to leave. So, in one corner, she has a plain duffel bag, filled with enough to keep her and Toto going for a few weeks on their own.
She's lived in her current apartment for over four years now, but she's still ready to leave at a moment's notice.
Secondary character POV: What annoys you the most about the MC?
Told from the perspective of the Western Witch
Dorothy Gale! Of course it had to be her who killed my partner.
She's so young, and optimistic. Why is she even that way?!
Well, I don't know what makes her different, but she won't stay this way. Even with all she's lost, the Land of Oz will take more.
And if it won't, I will.
#WritingWonders #DayTwelve #AmWriting
Does your MC have a healthy lifestyle?
Mostly.
She eats pretty well, and keeps fit.
But she can sometimes hyperfocus on a thing, and then kind of lose track of everything else. She might stay awake for 36 hours straight, and eat nothing but cheese balls and coke while working on a thing that really interests her. That's maybe not the healthiest thing to do.
She also guards herself against forming relationships. Since her mom died, the only real relationship that she's had has been with her dog, so she doesn't like to spend too much time around people. She tries to blame her loneliness on others. They're intimidated by her intelligence, she tells herself, or they don't like her because of her rough upbringing. But, in reality, she keeps people away. So, not a very healthy social or emotional lifestyle.
#WritingWonders #DayThirteen #AmWriting #WIP
How physically fit is your MC?
She's very fit. She eats healthy and runs, with Toto, most days.
Joining #TimeTravelAuthors this month.
#DayOne : Badly introduce your time travel story.
A girl and her dog take the subway downtown, but don't have the fare to get back.
@danjones000 Maybe something's wrong with me because that sounds kind of fun to me!
🍕⚾🖖@danjones000
From this point on you enter hell. Welcome…=)
About your story, they can walk. They just need be careful of trains…=)
#TimeTravelAuthors #DayTwo Free Day: tropes I'm using
At some point during my development of the story, I decided I wanted to feature Temporal Duplication in this story.
Basically, Dorothy, after traveling to the future, is going to meet other versions of herself, older than her, who had traveled to this future at some point later in their lives.
But this will also result in Alternate Timelines as well. Basically, interference from her future selves results in changing her past, so, the duplicates are from different timelines.
There will also be aspects of a split timeline plot, but the split timelines will really only be discussed in flashback, so maybe that doesn't really count.
I still haven't figured out exactly how all of this will be resolved in the end, though.
@danjones000 Oh, that's fascinating... I absolutely LOVE that sort of thing, in fact "Time & Tied" had Carrie as both the protagonist AND antagonist in the end. Good luck sorting it out!
In fact, if you can, let us know how you do... I'm having a devil of a time with something incredibly similar in my #WIP. (My current timeline is overwriting one just ahead of it, which can weird time jumps.)
DC Comics did a storyline with Superman several years back with this kind of paradox. Flash rewrote the timeline, so that DC could reboot their comics.
But after they did that, fans wanted the old Superman back.
So, they brought the old Superman back, the one who was married to Lois Lane and had a son. But also kept the younger one, who had dated Lois for a while, but now he was dating Wonder Woman.
And for a little while, both of them existed in same timeline. Two Clark Kents and two Lois Lanes.
Eventually they did a weird thing with a Watchmen crossover and integrated the two Supermen into one, rewriting the timeline again, merging their histories into a single one.
Luckily, the younger Lois had died, so they didn't have to integrate them as well.
I've been thinking about something like that, but the Superman thing was kind of magical, and I haven't come up with a scientific way to explain that. Something to do with exotic matter somehow, I think.
@danjones000 That sounds like comic books. I only have a passing interest (the BTTF Comic run was awesome) though do keep up with Linkara.
Exotic and dark matter are plausible, it helps there's a lot we don't know. I'm vaguely reminded of the three Data's integrating in the TNG episode "We'll Always Have Paris". And funny enough, this will probably come up in my story... execution may depend on how you see timelines.
#TimeTravelAuthors #DayThree : Properly introduce your time travel story
I came up with the idea from a single premise: what if The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was cyberpunk?
In our story, Dorothy Gale is a young physicist in the present time at MIT. She's kind of a loner. Her best friends are from her books: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, et. al. And of course, her Boston terrier, Toto.
She's working on a method for FTL communication by generating quantum wormholes, through which information could be passed through, but stumbles upon something greater when she manages to stabilize and enlarge one of the wormholes until it's large enough for a person to pass through.
She's been running away most of her life, so she grabs her go bag and steps through, and finds herself 1000 years in the future. By this point, people have moved underground. Society is not what it once was, with micro-kingdoms dotting the map.
She's unable to reopen the wormhole, but is it told the wise Wizard of a nearby kingdom can help.
@danjones000 Oh wow; that sounds very pitchable/salable...!
@danjones000
I'm fan! =)
#TimeTravelAuthors #DayFour Free Day
Using ChatGPT and Google Bard to research
I know a lot of folks in the #WritingCommunity have some negative feelings about generative text AI, and for good reason. Folks using AI-generated writing as their own is a big problem.
I'm not using ChatGPT, or similar to write my story for me. But, I've found it really useful for doing generating some ideas for my story.
I really wanted to use some kind of current theory that I could use as the basis for the time travel in my story. I didn't want to just handwave it.
In the original Wizard of Oz, Dorothy fails to get into the tornado shelter in time, and that's why she gets carried away to Oz. So, I wanted there to be some clear action on Dorothy's part that brought her to the future.
I asked ChatGPT and Google Bard "I'm writing a science fiction novella that involves time travel. What are some of the best ways to explain time travel, based on current scientific understanding?"
I got really good answers, a nice bulleted list with explanations for each, including time dilation (special relativity), gravity warping spacetime (general relativity), multiple universes, and quantum wormholes, which could, in theory, connect two points in spacetime. I asked a follow-up question on wormholes, and I got a lot of background on how they might relate to time travel, etc.
Of course, large language models are prone to hallucination, so I double-checked all the information. But really, I think these new tools are definitely going to be a help in researching for my writing (but not in doing the writing itself).
#TimeTravelAuthors #DayFive : Short quote Wednesday
"And I had my books. I had Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, and countless others. They are my friends."
@danjones000
Very good friends indeed. Just don't let water or fire touch them…=)
#TimeTravelAuthors #DaySeven : What does your time machine look like?
That's a little complicated. It's not exactly a single machine.
After some of her colleagues demonstrated a theoretical wormhole using quantum entanglement, Dorothy worked to make the theoretical practical.
Using a brand new quantum computer the University acquired, she was able to consistently create a wormhole. This is a quantum wormhole. Too small to see, but large enough for information to pass through.
She then created a device that could network with the quantum computer. It looks like a typical tablet computer, and she calls it her QPad. She attaches the QPad to her laptop (a traditional binary computer), and can connect to the quantum computer from anywhere, and is able to create a wormhole from wherever she is to her lab at MIT.
She was doing this one afternoon from her apartment in Ashmont. What she didn't know is that in about the year 3050, a more advanced quantum computer, being controlled by a certain Wizard, in roughly the same place as hers, had interfaced with her QPad. So instead of connecting to a computer ten miles away, she connected to one over a thousand years away.
And this computer could stabilize and enlarge the wormhole with a bit of exotic matter. So, when she started it up, instead of a subatomic wormhole forming, a ten feet tall, blue swirling vortex appeared in her living room.
@danjones000 The wormhole idea sounds similar to what I'm using, but the quantum angle is very clever. And I love the idea that she's interfacing over time instead of space (even used that for a short story once, kinda). Kudos.
I'm wondering if her dog started growling at it. (Also, how did you generate such a long post?)
Thanks!
Toto definitely would've started barking at the vortex.
I'm not using Mastodon. I'm using microblog.pub, which doesn't have any character limits for its posts.
Mastodon has one of the shortest character limits in the Fediverse, which is probably my main reason not to use it.
@danjones000 That is quite an intro...! Very neat! I was gonna say you lean heavy towards the science aspect, but then you said a wizard... 🤔
It's just a title: a way to inspire trust, and a little bit of fear, in others. The Wizard is very much a scientist.
Catching up with #TimeTravelAuthors #DayNine
Most important thing your MC experiences in time travel?
Meeting herself from different timelines.
She learns from this that, although she experienced hardships that most people don't, she still had some lucky breaks.
Also, three identical people, who lived nearly the same life, turning out to be very different people, allows her to hope, and realize that she has great power in shaping her own destiny.
Not that she believes in destiny.
@danjones000 Those are some excellent lessons. I wonder if the other versions are taking away similar lessons... and what the comparatively least and most well off Dorothy versions think about the situation.
#TimeTravelAuthors #DayThirteen #AmWriting #WIP
What character gave you trouble in your story?
There's a few.
Since I'm adapting an older story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, into a futuristic time travel story, I've had to figure out how to transfer the original characters into my story so that they fit.
Each of Dorothy's traveling companions in the story needed some futuristic parallel. The scarecrow who wanted a brain (who became an AI), and the Tin Woodman who wanted a heart (who becomes a cyborg) were pretty easy.
The Cowardly Lion was more difficult. I eventually settled on a genetically modified person, who was upset that he now inspired fear in others, which kind of flips the script.
I've also not yet figured out how to adapt each of the random people/groups that they meet along the way, such as the Field Mice.
I've got a few pieces figured out, but it's still very much a work in progress.
@danjones000 The Cowardly Lion is an especially interesting take!
@danjones000 How unfare! (I'll show myself out.)
Good description for a minimalist there, and it managed to put "Downtown" by Petula Clark into my head, so there's that.
@danjones000 The lie must be #2 (Toto). Right?
Yeah. I couldn't really do with a big, floofy dog bounding around a dystopic technoscape.
I'll stick with some small, energetic terrier, like in the movie.
How about if the various witches are politicians... 😆
@danjones000 Time traveler? You're welcome to join #TimeTravelAuthors too. (You might even enjoy the 'is time travel isekai' video I referenced last week.)
Also kind of hoping that last one isn't the lie because it sounds like it'd be really cool. Though the first is clever as well.
Nah. The lie is the one about Toto. He's gotta be a little, energetic dog, no matter how the story's being told.
@danjones000 Fair enough! I really don't know from dogs, I first thought a 'Samoyed' was an alien race, until I did a search. Looking forward to seeing more about quantum wormholes, at least!
. A Samoyed is a big, white, floofy dog from Siberia.
Didn't really fit in with the dystopian future I was imagining for the setting.
@danjones000 Happy April and welcome back! 😊
I'm going with Toto for the lie
You got it.
I haven't decided for sure, but he's going to be some kind of terrier, small and energetic.
@danjones000 I couldn't picture Toto as a Samoyed, so that's why I went with it 😊
@danjones000 this sounds awesome!