So I decided to join the National Novel Writing Month group again, and I'm about to write a novel in November. I wasn't going to do it, but I think the exercise of writing every day will keep my mind off my roller coaster ride of a life. My life is one big trauma right now, and I need to do some serious writing to keep me from getting too depressed.

I got into this habit where I'm writing constant letters to my future self 20 years into the future, to ask advice about what I'm going through. It's really trippy because my future self writes back about a future I'm supposed to have which seems so impossible. My future self says she went through the same things I have, but she never wrote letters to her future self the way I'm doing right now. She keeps saying some things in a person's timeline can't be changed. Anyway it's kind of like having an running argument with myself, and it kind of keeps me amused and thinking about things.

But my future self letters have me really interested in writing a story about a character trying to change her future. So I titled my new novel "Changing Timelines", and it will be about a character who discovers a way to remote view into the future and who of course (like her creator) so does not like the future she sees that she tries desperately to change the timeline.

My future self keeps writing to me that while I do have free choice and free will in my life, some timelines cannot be changed. And when my future self says timelines, she means that a certain person will always be in my life no matter what I do. She says it doesn't matter what I do or don't do, if the other person does choose to take a different path, then the person remains in my timeline.

I hate her vision of the how the future works, because it makes me across like a passive victim and I don't believe I'm that. But my future self insists that there are other forces, divine forces at work, that brought us together and which I cannot tear apart. And I hate this interpretation! So I spend many letters arguing about free will, free choice, divine intervention, god's will, god's plan, and on an on with my future self. I am definitely at war with myself right now, and I guess it helps psychologically to argue with myself on paper.

Anyway, all this traumarama makes for an interesting novel about what a person would be willing to do to change a future they don't want. Like how far would my character be willing to go to change her future? Would she be willing to commit crimes, maybe even murder to change her future? I couldn't do that myself, so maybe I need to write about a character who does just to see how far I would really go in a fictional world.

I could explore the ethics lesson I had in grade school. Does the ends equal the means or the means equal the end? In other words, would I be willing to kill if it meant I would be preventing something equally horrible happening. And in grade school I told my teacher I don't know, it depends on the situation. And she just looked at me and said I was "situationalist" and that I saw the world in shades of grey and not in black and white. Looks like I was a post modernist thinker even in my youth. You can thank my hippie grade school teachers for it. They started us on the post modernist track very young.