January 27, 2016: Looking to the future through the past

     Nowadays, people are using the word and concept "reboot". If something has been done before, it seems that sooner or later, someone else will come along and say, "I could do that better than they did." Then, they write a new script and film a new show and we have a reboot. Star Trek did that a few years back with an entirely new cast playing the familiar characters and rewrote the origin stories of Kirk, McCoy, Spock and the others. I'm not sure if I can ever forgive them for blowing up the planet Vulcan, but that's a topic for another day.
     Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be great if we as humans could say, "You know, if I had another chance, I think I could make my life better." I think that everyone has some event in their life that they wish they could alter to a more favorable outcome. Maybe age has given you the wisdom to see the value of your parents and you wish you could go back and work harder on that relationship. Maybe you did something really stupid and hurt someone that you cared a lot about, and wish you could go back and prevent yourself from acting that way. It could be that what you did wasn't necessarily something so blatant. Perhaps you just let someone slip out of your life due to neglect, and now you look back and wish you had kept up with them.
     There are any number of reasons why someone might wish they could change the way their lives turned out. In my new novel that should be released in February, a character named Ed Delaney finds himself in a disastrous marriage and realizes that he made some wrong choices in his life. Fortunately for him, he is a brilliant scientist who has just completed the world's first functioning time machine. Although he decides that he would never use the device for his own personal self improvement, an accident at the lab occurs that throws him back thirty years to a time when he could choose the road not taken and try to make things better.
     The story is full of romance and hard choices for Ed and leads him through the mid-nineties and into the future. He struggles with each decision he makes and wonders whether or not he is really doing the right thing by interfering with the past that he remembers.
     I think I have decided on the title "At Some Point in Time". but I should be making the official announcement when I release the book, hopefully in mid-February.