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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.

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Catching up with

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.

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: 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.

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: 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."

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Free Day

Using ChatGPT and Google Bard to research

I know a lot of folks in the 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).

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: 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.

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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.

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Joining this month.

: Badly introduce your time travel story.

A girl and her dog take the subway downtown, but don't have the fare to get back.