Today was a very productive day, probably more productive than the last week or so. Coming up with a mentor character named Mage who went to the future and came back helped me tie up a loose end that I’ve been struggling with.

I knew Vertragus thought he had picked the wrong version of Courtney from a different analog of Earth than he had planned, and I used the self fulfilling prophecy literary device to make it so that at the beginning of the story, a mentor character told him to acquire her, because it would help them with a time travel experiment.

They will be the first of their kind to alter history without generating a new timeline. This helps with the beginning of the novel, and shows how Courtney and Vanessa ended up in that alternate reality in the first place.

If I had been a pantser and didn’t outline my novel first, this would’ve been something I might have thought of three quarters of the way through the novel, and I would’ve had to do extensive editing and rewriting.