Since I admitted that I believe time travel exists and is being used by the government, let's go back in time for a minute. It would be difficult for the government to implement technology without ramifications, but I'm sticking with it; I believe it's been done. Let's see if I can be as successful as the government.
I could lie and say there's nothing in my life I would change, because if I did change something then I wouldn't have my loving husband, my three beautiful children, my beautiful home and wonderful neighbors; but I know there must be something I can change that will be impactful without destroying my current life. So, I'm just going to have to be careful and cognizant of what I choose to change.
I'm kind of a bold individual so I'm not going to go at this genie-in-a-bottle style; there are no three chances to get it right, I offer endless possibilities. I say, move things around in your mind like a rubik's cube, just no cheating; you can't take the stickers off and put them back in the right spots. It has to happen naturally.
It's difficult to plan a voyage back in time knowing what it is that I don't want to change. I'm off to a good start though. Knowing what I don't want to change is important, it keeps me alive; if I know what I want to keep in my life then I might not accidentally off myself or anyone I love in my travels (hopefully everyone stays breathing, even if I don't love them).
Now I can start mapping out my journey and pinpointing my destination. Before I get in the machine, I have to keep in mind that my goal here is not to change my husband, my children, or where I live.
By not changing my goal, I almost need to stay completely away from my path of ex-boyfriends. If I hadn't met guy #1, and broken it off at the precise time I originally chose, then I wouldn't have met guy #2, who was so aweful that I had to completely alter the course of my life; a survival instinct. Thank God I changed my path, because that's how I met my husband.
(I'm rubbing my hands together out of excitement and deep thought) This is a lot more difficult than I originally imagined. It's okay, I'm not giving up.
What if I tackled my shyness earlier than when I met my husband? Would that alter my path to my husband? Let's see. I've always been a bit introverted and a little bit shy, but the acting classes helped conquer that fear (helped is the operative word here). I could start out with small stuff; I wished that I had had the courage to ask Ryan Seacrest for his signature when he was a host on Click in 1997 and I was a production assistant.
So, one of my stops will be to 1997 at The Production Group on Vine Street in Hollywood. I will have just finished going out to the store to buy Ryan a set of forest green hand towels for his dressing room. I will casually ask him for one of the headshots he was handing out to contestants with his signature, and he will say yes. I will have more confidence in my life going forward as a result of this change. But does that change my path to my husband? Unfortunately, it does. Confidence leads directly into the ex-boyfriend path; a little confidence would've help me avoid guy #2 but I needed guy #2 to meet my husband. I will just have to live without Ryan's signature.
I know! I will go back to 1986 and I won't push my sister while she is jumping on my dad's jogging trampoline in the basement. That way she won't fall off and bang her head on the concrete of the unfinished floor. She wouldn't have to tell me I was an evil witch who always had it out to kill her (I was only 8. I don't remember having any plans to off her). But then, I might not have been so open to my World Religions class in high school, which would have ultimately prevented me from meeting by best friend, Nicole. Sorry Sis, I can't give up Nicole and enlightenment for a bump on your head.
Is there anything, anything at all that I could change about myself that would have prevented me from sending out queries before I read Query Shark's blog? Perhaps I could go back to January of this year, and start my research before I started writing my books. Nothing about my recent writing would alter my current life. Is that cheating? Even if it is, I couldn't go back and do the research before the writing because then I would have psyched myself out and may not have written the books.
I could go back and stick to focusing on my writing. Let me roll this around in my head for a minute. I couldn't go far enough back to change my college major; doing that would alter my path to my husband. However, I could have finished that creative writing course, and continued writing short stories and children's books. I couldn't have written the books I've recenlty written back then, because I didn't have a good enough perspective on life to write YA fiction very well. But I could have kept writing something other than my journal entries. That's it! I will go back to 1998. That's the year I got my first polite rejection from a publisher. I will not shelve the project this time; I will send it out again and I will start elaborating on another story I shelved around that time. That way I still have my family, my house and my neighbors and nobody has to die in my journey.
I found a way to go back in the past and change something that would positively impact my life today without sacrificing my family and my living situation. It was hard.
So, how is the government doing it? I say, thankfully I'm not part of the government's time travel program because I think their ramifications are vast and the amount of lives that might have been sacrificed to bring us our blogging rights, only forty one years after we landed on the moon and only eighteen years after the Internet was released by CERN, might be astonishing. (This was an excercise to challenge myself to make impactful changes without devastating consequences, not an excercise to change my beliefs about the government time traveling in order to advance technology and society. I encourage differing beliefs though, do you have one?)
How did you fare in your time travels? Did you make it out alive? Were you able to advance yourself without changing the most important aspects of your current life?
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