Resonant Blue: Paranormal Legacy Blog Tour

11 March 2013

Paranormal Legacy Blog Tour

Today, I'm hosting Caitlin Hensley as she tours the blogosphere, promoting her book Paranormal Legacy. The post below was provided by the author.

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If you write science fiction, then at some point or another, in at least one story or novel, you're probably going to write about some type of time travel. Time travel seems to be a popular element in a lot of sci-fi movies, TV shows, comics, and yes, books. But before we get into all that, first let's talk about sci-fi versus fantasy.

Back when I was first getting into writing, I was a little confused about the boundaries between the science fiction and fantasy genres. In my mind, they basically equaled the same thing. I used the terms interchangeably. But as I found out, fantasy and sci-fi are NOT the same thing.

As explained on the blog Who's Your Editor:

"This is science fiction: The sun has turned blue because a comet, made purely of cobalt, smashed into it and melted, mixing its naturally potent and sapphire colored minerals in with the sun’s fiery surface.

And this is fantasy: In my world, we have three suns. One is orange, another is red, and the final is blue. Each day a different sun shines over this beautiful country, smothering it in kaleidoscope colors, painting the land unnaturally.”

Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Or it does to me, at least. Another thing I've read is that fantasy usually has stuff that's magical, while sci-fi has scientific explanations for everything. Using those guidelines, you should be able to decide whether your book is science fiction or fantasy.

Now that we've got that all sorted out, back to the original topic: time travel. If you're writing a sci-fi novel, and it includes some sort of time travel, you have to set rules. You can't have one character accidentally change the future while stepping on a butterfly, then another character in the same story murder an important historical figure and return to an unchanged future. It simply can't be done.

That being said, here are a few rules you could establish for time travel in your book:

1. Don't interfere with any events, because even the slightest changed detail could horrifically alter your future.

2. Feel free to alter any events you like, maybe even killing, say, Napoleon, because history has a natural inertia, and will bounce right back on track no matter what happens.

3. When you travel back, you end up in the mind of someone in that time period. You live inside them and see through their eyes, but they have no idea that you're there.

4. You end up in the body of your past self, and can control every thought and action. Once you leave, your past self has no idea that anything out of the ordinary occurred.

5. You can only travel back a set number of hours.

6. You're invisible, so you can only observe, not interact with the past.

7. In the future, hardly anyone travels back, because just one trip can seriously weaken and/or kill you.

8. Traveling back means that you leave behind important things such as clothes, and end up naked in a different time.

9. Whatever you do, don't interact with yourself. That could cause a huge paradox disaster.

10. You can only travel back through time in a blue telephone booth. But on second thought, you probably shouldn't use that in your book. That's already taken.

Caitlin Hensley has been telling stories since she learned to hold a pen, and is pretty much obsessed with writing. She’s the author of The Inhuman Chronicles, as well as the novelette Together Alone. When not typing frantically on her laptop, she’s usually dancing, catching up on reruns of her favorite TV shows, or getting lost in a great book. She lives in rural Oklahoma with her family and a slightly nutty Chihuahua.