Writer's Blog: Timely Matters (Patreon)

I’ve been finishing up the last entries for the Aeon Student Guide and have encountered an annoying problem: the calendar. It’s made me swear off clocks and curse out the Time Lords. (Not really, but you get my drift. Chronology sucks.)

Writing the history of Ments is one thing—Mind Blind obviously takes place sometime after the eighteenth century. It’s also easy enough for me to specify that Ments didn’t have full legal rights until Unity’s creation post-Korean Reunification, using events instead of years to establish a timeline.

However, writing about Unity’s creation and the Korean Reunification is tricky. So dang tricky. Because I can’t use dates. Don’t get me wrong, I personally know that the Korean Reunification ended twenty-nine years ago. In my mind, this is somewhere around the late-nineties. But I refuse to put that into print, because as soon as I assign a date, Mind Blind is destined to become obsolete.

It’s like with Back to the Future II—Marty and Doc travel forwards to the year 2015. As soon as 2015 actually passed, however, the movie transformed from science fiction into an unfulfilled prophecy, and the disappointment that we never got anything near cool as Jimmy’s hoverboard. Science fiction that assigns a timeline to its events ultimately becomes historical fiction instead. A relic.

Since Mind Blind is set in the near future, I don’t even have Back to the Future’s thirty-year grace period before becoming out of date (more like five to ten). Granted, the only reason that I set Mind Blind in the future in the first place was to be able to hand wave away advanced tech that doesn’t currently exist, but still. If anyone reads Mind Blind ten years from now, I don’t want to explicitly inform them that they’re playing through an outdated book.

Assigning hard dates to recent events also means that the cast members become products of their generation. I don’t want it to be clear whether Rosy is a millennial or Gen Z, for example—despite the similarities with real life, Mind Blind is still an alternate universe, and I want to avoid giving readers expectations about characters based off their year of birth.

But writing an informative summary about something like a war or an organization’s founding without mentioning a timeline is near impossible. Vagueness doesn’t really work when explaining a sequence of semi-recent events, and my efforts to eschew dating battles made the passages excruciatingly convoluted and difficult to understand. Sure, I could go the I-Don’t-Care-Anymore route, and list all dates as 19XX, but that breaks immersion.

Is there an answer? I’m sure that one exists, likely involving some clever writing and/or formatting, but I’ve reached the point where I’ve needed to step away from the final Aeon Passages or risk an existential breakdown where I realize that time is an illusion and everything is transitory and dates don’t exist and . . .

Like I stated before, I needed to step away. Hopefully, my brain has a breakthrough while taking a bubble bath one day (that’s how Nick ended up in Button’s mind, after all!). But if anyone has suggestions on how I can avoid the trap of time, I’d love to read them.