It looks like Chapter 8 of The Time Traveler's Baby Daddy posted this morning! That's a chapter that I wanted to talk about a little, and in general some behind-the-scenes things about the story, because I've gotten a couple of questions!
So the first thing is that I actually did a decent amount of research for the story, and tried to be as historically accurate as I could (aside from the time travel bit, of course).
I did have in my mind a particular city that their unnamed university was in, and used that to make decisions about things. In particular, I looked up historical weather records in order to make sure I was describing things as accurately as possible.
So when in Chapter 8-set on February 18, 2006-it's described as a cold snap, that is in fact a weekend that a very real cold snap came through in that particular city. It's possibly I had the precipitation wrong (I don't know that their records were keeping it during that time), but I'm willing to fudge it just a little for the sake of story!
But there are other things. For instance, the sports game in Chapter 1? That was a real game, where an underdog team beat the heavy favorites in a second overtime (if you do a little googling, I'm sure you can find it)! When I mention video games, or music, or movies, or anything like that, I almost always did research to at least know for myself what it was they were referring to. So when later on, one of the characters talks about "the new Zelda game", that is, quite in fact, a reference to a Zelda game that had literally come out a month earlier than that, and I did the legwork to figure out what sort of game could realistically be talked about like that.
Bamboo Wok, however, is a fictional restaurant, if based on one that was popular in my college years. But I do have a friend who raves about hot braised chicken all the time, so...that's where that came from! (Myself, I always preferred sweet and sour chicken)
A number of people have asked how on Earth I kept the timeline straight, and it was mostly: lots of documentation.
But I'm going to take a step back.
The story idea came to me with the scene of the first chapter, where a guy is sitting down to watch some sports when a girl shows up on his doorstep five months pregnant and saying he's going to do it in the future. I took that scene and started running with it, and ended up sketching out most of the first chapter as a result-though as I wrote, I kept needing to change a lot of things, and that first chapter went through a lot of revision before it got to the end.
But also, in that very first conception of the story, both Megan and Rory were unstuck in time, and so I was actually going to have to keep track of both of them bouncing around!
I put the kibosh on that, because that was just too much to keep track of! (But there are some remnants of that idea in there, what with the time mites and all)
That said, my Scrivener project has several files in it called "Timeline" in various incarnations, and do follow a progression as I wrote as my figuring out the timeline and working through it. Ultimately, there's a gold standard file that's "Megan's Timeline", which details the sequence of events from her perspective (and is coupled with "Main Timeline" which is Rory's perspective), with chapter numbers indicated. This is how I worked out the list of chapters that'll be in the end note once it finishes posting (or is in the Afterward if you purchase the ebook from Bookapy).
And when I did editing, I did my first editing pass from Rory's perspective (so, front to back) and then the second editing pass I took Megan's timeline and did it from her perspective, making sure that her journey also made sense. She's having to learn things about her crazy twisty-turny life just like Rory is, she just does it in a different order.
(I then did a final third pass again through the book in normal order just to make sure it still read fine)
Oh, I'm sure there are other behind-the-scenes things I could talk about, and I'm still really excited about it. We're really going to start getting to some of my favorite parts pretty soon here, and I cannot wait to hear what you all think of it!
As always, thank you so much for reading. We authors would be nothing without readers, and I seriously do appreciate each and every one of you, and I love hearing what you have to say. Your kind notes are what sustain me as I work on my next thing (which, I'm afraid to say, is probably going to be significantly more mundane than The Time Traveler's Baby Daddy is).
Hope to hear from you!