New story on Patreon: “The Moving Finger Writes”

My second Patreon-original story, “The Moving Finger Writes,” is now up for subscribers at the Original Fiction tier and above. This is a companion piece to last month’s “The Cat Who Chased Her Tail Through Time,” since it was my second attempt to do a story under that title, and it again features characters based on my family cats, but this time in a less self-indulgent way, as felinoid aliens in a hard-SF context. While “Cat Who Chased” is a nostalgic exercise that I published almost exactly as I wrote it decades ago, this one was closer to being a viable story, so I’ve revised it extensively for this release, incorporating some more current ideas about time travel and its ramifications, and renaming it to avoid confusion with the previous story.

Originally written in late 1996, this story is actually a merger and expansion of two 1991 vignettes built around the featured time-travel concept, inspired by a June 1989 Discover Magazine article about Kip Thorne and Mike Morris’s theoretical model for how a traversable wormhole could allow time travel. I’d virtually forgotten this story existed until I accidentally opened it while looking for the earlier “Cat” story, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it held up. I’d also forgotten that this story featured the first version of the character that would eventually evolve into Tsshar Murieff in my Hub series, though the two incarnations are extremely different.

After writing the Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels and e-novellas, trying to make sense of the fanciful rules of time travel in that universe, I’d been thinking it might be interesting to attempt a story based in the more scientifically plausible premise of an immutable timeline. I’ve made a couple of stabs at it in recent years, but neither story quite worked out. Imagine my surprise to rediscover that I’d already written just such a story, and that it needed only a bit more work to see the light of day.