JL Peridot’s blog

Until We Met Again: A peek at the past

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My time travel romance is finally launching in October after being on the back burner for over a year! This little novelette has been on quite the journey – researching it, writing it, and preparing it for what eventually was a non-release, saw me through a train of life events, including losing a loved one, my first public author appearance, the disappearance of a dear friend, a family emergency, and meeting my baby niblings for the first time.

As a reader, I never gave much thought to the significance of manuscripts beyond story. But now that I’ve written several manuscripts, I’ve come to see them as markers for stretches of time where life events happen, milestones you pass on the rode to somewhere, oftentimes somewhere unknown.

Until We Met Again is launching as a standalone, but it wasn’t originally written this way. The earliest complete version was crafted to sit at the end of specific romance pieces in an anthology, a time travel novelette that (with the consent of the other authors) would incorporate elements from the stories that come before. I’d never seen this done in multi-author anthologies, and thought it would be an interesting exploration of craft.

The actual writing had to be done in three parts. First, I had to write my story up to around the halfway/two-thirds mark to establish the concept and premise. Then I had to wait until all the other stories were written before I could work their elements into my draft and figure out how to get to the end. Finally, I had to provide my fellow anthology-mates with elements from my story to incorporate into the background of theirs to support the time travel concept of my protagonist visiting their settings in the past.

It was, in a way, not unlike time travel, having the future of other stories affect the past in my own. And then for those changes I made to ripple into how those other stories would finally end up. There’s this idea that time itself doesn’t exist, and what we refer to as “time” is simply our subjective experience of particular states in a coherent sequence at a particular location. This idea fascinates me, and I wish I was smart enough to think about it more in-depth, but I’m still actually recovering from how meta things got, organising fictional points in time while managing real-world ones.

Anyway, we made it all the way to collating the anthology, hiring an editor, and designing the cover. And then we discovered why you don’t see this kind of thing done in multi-author anthologies.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. One manuscript belonging to one writer can bear witness to a host of many significant, life-changing events. Multiply that by the number of authors in an anthology and you’ve got all these possibilities in a kind of superposition occupying the quantum space of the book. Kind of.

Days before we were due to prep for go, we encountered a situation: one of our number disappeared. The only way forward we all felt comfortable with was to cancel the anthology. It was a darkly fitting development for Until We Met Again, since the story itself deals with things and people suddenly vanishing from your life.

Giving up the project was sad, but worse was not knowing what became of our dear collaborator. More than a year on, I still don’t know, and can only hope they’re okay, hope I see them again someday.

Until We Met Again – a time travel romance novelette

Until We Met Again

A time traveller absconds to the past in search of her lost love.

One word: my name. A call from Origin through the neural lace grafted to my brain and nerves, connecting me to another place in another time. A reminder of what I’m here to do.

I clutch a bottle cap; its sharp metal edges ground me in the present. It’s funny, don’t you think, to consider this moment the present, as if the past and future I came from aren’t supposed to exist? If you were here, I’d ask. You’d smile and kiss my forehead and say you love my nonsense questions.

But you’re not here. They want me to forget you ever were.

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