Retrospective – Time Waits

In which I do some more rambling.

“Time Waits” is a story that I never really thought I’d finish.

It began more than four years ago in a burst of inspiration. Stories about a character who can stop time and uses it for sexual hijinks are pretty common, and I had an interest in trying my own take on the trope. One of my favorites thing about writing fantasy and sci-fi stories is when I get to write scenes that I couldn’t do anywhere else, and as soon as I started writing “Time Waits”, my head filled up with ideas like that. I wrote more than 30k words in the first week, which might not sound like a big deal given the longer stories I’ve written lately, but at the time that was twice as long as any full story I’d ever written, and I knew that this one was only just getting started. I was so enthusiastic about “Time Waits” that I actually took a personal day that week because I just had so much I wanted to write down, and I couldn’t stand having to spend the day at work instead.

And then things stopped. I didn’t write the initial Jordan POV chapters until much later, but I had a rough draft covering everything from Christine’s first chapter to Rebecca being abducted by Jordan. The problem was figuring out what happened after she came back. I’d been writing the story by ear, changing the plot on the fly, and I felt like I’d hit something of a dead end. I had some very vague ideas for the plot ahead, including Jordan’s eventual self destruction after getting married, but zero specifics. I had plenty of other stories to work on, so I just figured that I’d come back to it later and see if I found new inspiration. And I tried. Believe me, I tried. Every few months or so, I’d open “Time Stop.odt” and read through it, remembering how much I loved this story… and then reach the end and find I still had nothing to add.

So what changed? My decision at the start of this year to be more forgiving with myself about posting incomplete stories. There were plenty of little bits missing from the story, like Jordan’s intro or Christine’s police interrogation, but it wouldn’t take much work to fill those parts in, and a lot of what was already on the page were among my favorite scenes I’d ever written. I was okay with spending a couple months posting what I had, and then moving on to something else.

“It wouldn’t take much work to fill those parts in”. I should have that on my tombstone. By the time we made it back to Rebecca’s homecoming, the story had nearly doubled in size, and huge swaths of existing text had been rewritten. Rebecca’s time in Jordan’s basement was originally covered in 3 pages. The final version was 27. But my hard work was not in vain. Filling in and polishing everything had given me a much better sense of the story, and when I hit that four year old plot wall this time, I smashed through the damn thing. I cannot thank John Drake enough for his assistance, by the way. Without his help for brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of, there is little chance this story would have been finished, at least not for a long time and in worse quality. Of course, without him I also wouldn’t have spent so much time this year writing *checks notes* 162k words about foxes, so those of you who prefer my non-fantasy stories might not be too happy about our cooperation 😛

Some general unconnected thoughts:

For those wondering, the story was never going to have an unhappy ending. I knew from the very beginning that Christine would eventually triumph over Jordan, even if I didn’t know how. I also figured out early on that she was going to need to lose her memory if I wanted a truly happy ending, because otherwise the severe damage he was doing to her psyche was going to make it nearly impossible to do better than bittersweet. Poor Christine. Unfortunately for her, since I knew I was going to be undoing all the damage she received, I felt compelled to be extra cruel 😉 The snuff element in particular, which shows up later with many of the side characters, is something I wouldn’t have used nearly as much, if at all, if I didn’t know it would get reversed by the end.

Getting to focus a bit more on Christine and how the trauma was affecting her made her one of my favorite characters to write, and I always love women like Rebecca who can kick ass and take names, so I was very pleased to craft a positive ending for both sisters. Reciprocity played a major role in their ending: Christine indirectly rescues Rebecca by way of defeating Jordan, and then Rebecca rescues Christine by talking her through what’s happening to her. I’ve been informed that I often have a theme that “people can accomplish more together than alone”, and this is no exception. 😉 Both of them are heroes of the story in different ways, and both of them are stronger because of the bond between them.

Despite the overall length, I quickly adopted a very fast pace through the story, because what mattered to me was playing with the time travel aspect, and the more I lingered on any particular point in the timeline, the less time travel mattered. Take the couple months, for example, where the flashforward at the beginning of the story took place, with Christine being forced to have sex with Jordan in and out of school. While this situation could only come about because of his powers, in execution it looks similar to a standard “male student blackmails female student into sex” story, and I can write one of those anytime I want. So instead of devoting multiple chapters to this stage in their lives, I just established the situation, gave a glimpse of what it looked for them, and then moved on to the next stage (in this case, Rebecca’s arrival).

I enjoyed the chance to develop a villain over time, as I got to do with Jordan. While my stories are usually about an incredibly important and traumatic time for the victims, they’re typically just another day in the life for their abusers, so there’s not much room for them to grow and change from the experience like the victims get to do, even when the story ultimately ends in their arrest/death. Here we get to see Jordan’s descent from being a fairly normal boy with some very unhealthy ideas about sex and women, who starts out rationalizing his actions every step of the way to find excuses for his behavior, to a vicious rapist as callous and cruel as any I’ve written. In the same way that I made Christine’s treatment more brutal once I knew I’d get to erase it, once I knew that Jordan was going to suffer for eternity, I had to make him deserve it.

For the record, if Jordan had opened up to Christine at the start of the story instead of giving into his darker impulses and taking advantage of her, he would’ve gotten over his baggage, become a decent person that used his powers for good, and lived happily ever after with her. His story is very much intended to be a tragedy, not because he doesn’t deserve what happens to him, but because he came so close to being better. That, by the way, is why part 1 is titled “The Beginning of the End”. The moment he betrayed her trust, he was committed to his path.

Also for the record, I spent wayyyyyyy too much time thinking about the physics of stopping time for the sake of this story. :p

That’s all that comes to mind at the moment. If anyone has any thoughts or questions about the story, I’d be more then happy to address them here. Otherwise, I’ll see y’all Monday for a one shot that I promise will be dark and nasty.