Time Travel Without the Science Ph'D
A Time Travel story that doesn't require your last name to be Hawking, Bohr, or Einstein.
The only way I was (am) going to survive the stupidity of the past almost two months is to treat the unnecessary lockdown as a writer's retreat. There are problems with that fundamental concept.
I have good writing habits to begin with.
I can write almost anywhere at any time of day.
I don't need some special place and time to do it.
However, while I suffer yet another foolish, ennui-inducing presser by Andrew "The Ventilator" Cuomo, and Bill "My Hair's On Fire" de Blasio, I talked myself into viewing this Connecticut retreat as just that.
To date, after 24 days in GLP, Connecticut, I have cranked out the daily blog on various goings on in and around our off-season rental, a thrice-weekly movie/TV review for a Facebook group, and dozens of snarky postings which I find hilarious.
The greatest accomplishment so far is the more than 20,000 words I've written for the time travel novel, Time Blinked.
Time Blinked is the story of a great high school baseball player who finds himself a member of the 1975 Philadelphia Phillies, my childhood team, and perhaps the only spectator sport franchise I still care about.
The lead character is my younger brother, Bobby, a great athlete, good at just about every sport he tried. Ice Hockey. Bowling (not kidding). And Baseball.
My brother had a great arm. He was big and strong, and blessed with the same great reflexes which made me a very good athlete in some sports, but a very average one in most.
In TIME Blinked, Bobby, through a quantum physics hiccup in the space / time continuum, disappears from an exhibition game in 2020 and finds himself in the same game in 1975. Before the coach of the Phillies at the time, Danny Ozark, can get him out of the batter's box, Bobby crushes a 500 foot home run off Vida Blue, an all-star southpaw at the time for the Oakland Athletics, my favorite American League team.
The Phillies sign the mysterious young phenom and he guides them to the World Series against the dreaded Yankees.
The backdrop during the season includes an investigation into Bobby's background by the envious son of the owner of Phillies; the kidnapping of our then five-year-old mother, Elizabeth Leonard, by the Philly mob; and a Black Sox sized World Series scandal.
The entire year Bobby wrestles with his new found fame as a star player with the Phillies, which he knows did not make the World Series that year, nor did the Yankees. What other historical events did he change by going back in time 45 years? He struggles to come to terms with the knowledge that he may never go "home."
I discussed "home" in yesterday's article.
What I am most proud of, other than my brother who is a good husband, father, and college administrator, is the device I used to get Bobby back to 1975.
The creative struggle took years to find something that didn't require the reader to have an advanced degree in non-linear geometry or theoretical calculus.
A first draft of Time Blinked will be finished before we leave Connecticut in early June. The editorial work and rewrites will begin in the middle of the month or early July.
Just about the same time Cuomo and de Blasio extend the lockdown for "Just two more weeks.”
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