I made my first notes for The Time Well two years ago when I was thinking about what might happen if someone were to travel in time. Someone appearing in the past would automatically create a new future, but what happens to the old future? What if it ceases to exist? Then all that space-time would be annihilated, including all the people. I imagine someone would fight to stop that annihilation. Governments might try to outlaw time travel, scientists might sign agreements never to do it, etc., but in a world where something is possible, eventually someone will do it. So if you didn’t want anyone to travel in time and you had sufficient resources, would you become a vigilante to stop it from happening? That was the basic idea for The Time Well. 

Time travel researchers have been dying in strange accidents ever since the mechanics of time travel were first theoretically posited in 2040. But in 2068, the band of billionaires who have been ordering the murders miss killing a researcher and murder his family instead. With nothing left in this time line for him, the scientist surreptitiously builds the world’s first time machine.

I envisioned The Time Well as a trilogy of novels. As I wrote, though, I realized I did not have enough story or subplots to fill three novels. What I had was working well, though, so I cut it down to one novel with three parts. The second and third parts turned out to be heavy on the love story part of the plot but light on science fiction, so I did a rewrite. Now the middle part is not tense or gripping enough, so I am rewriting again. Unfortunately, in the process the book has expanded (it’s now nearly one hundred forty thousand words). That’s too much story for one book, but not enough for three. So now I must decide what to do with it yet again!