Timelines in Fiction

Recorded 2026-07-27 We start by trying to not talk about the weather, without success. We do manage to limit it to a mere minute and 38 seconds. If you think climate change is a myth you probably want to skip that bit. On to progress. I report a pathetic 16 pages of editing and 880 words into a new short story. Michael read the short story I've been bugging him to read for the last three episodes. He's making progress on his editing, tightening the story up. He's starting to gain some momentum in the process and is enjoying that. He's ten chapters away from the finish line. We discuss handing the work to an editor and our trepidation over the feedback we will get. We talk about reading our reviews. The discussion of what a good review is takes us into a side trip into story structure and plot. Back on track, we set our goals for the next two weeks. I go for another thirty pages edited. Michael's goal is to finish the edits on his book and to launch his website. We get onto our topic: timelines. I talk about jumping around in my novel, because the story starts with a crisis, but then I need to step back to explain how that crisis got set up. Michael talks about placing a story into a known time period and getting the context right, something I need to do with another story that's set in the late 1990's. We talk about how different authors have approached timelines, and time travel stories that change the course of future events. Next week's topic: breakthroughs and the excitement of a breakthrough and the wall that comes before it.