For Everything, There Is A First Time

"You should write a book!" If I had a quid for every time someone had said that to me, I would...well, okay in truth I'd have about a fiver. But it was enough times to make me think "yeah, why don't I?" On the surface, my over active imagination and love of wordy words would seem to be conducive with writing, but I lacked an important facet - an idea. I thought I had one in 2003, when a simple game of Madlibs at work began to propagate an idea of a fantasy universe based around a character called Vernon Wanglefletcher. However, this too petered out within fifty pages, the initial excitement drowned in a paddling pool of self-loathing. Becoming an author would be filed on the "Things Too Big To Conceive Of Doing" shelf, along with "Becoming An Astronaut" and "Superheroism For Dummies".

That is until late 2018, when a bored look around the filing cabinets at work fired my imagination. Each drawer had a tag on the front detailing the surnames of the personnel files therein. The first one showed "A-Bel", another "Rig-San" and so on. I took note of all of them and spent the next hour randomly coming up with character bios for the truncated names. These bios have since been lost to the mists of time, but the juices had once again been let loose from behind their dam. Once again though, a mould of an idea was required to allow those juices to form into a novel-shaped jelly.

A few months later, at the beginning of 2019, the jelly mould flashed before my minds eye. I had a vision of a man staring at a version of himself through a wormhole. A better looking, fitter version of himself. But how could this happen? I was as excited to find out from my brain as I hoped others would be if I could turn it into a story. 

To my surprise, my brain actually stepped up and within a few days, the story outline was pretty much set, the basic characters were formed and internet was repeatedly and feverishly searched for indications of whether this idea had been written before. It hadn't it seemed and I was about to add an ingredient that would make the story unique - in a story about parallel universes, all the events that caused them to form would be based around events from my own life. The main character would be based around me. They say "write what you know" and so I would...