For the last couple weeks I've been writing and tweaking a nice story that came to me at the end of a rare long session of sleep.

Like the moon missions where the United States's hand was forced by international politics to move too quickly and too soon, the protagonist is sent into time-shift before scientists and the agency for whom he operates has all the bugs worked out. But the nature of the threat calls for premature action. The story tracks this first recorded time-shift mission and the agent's experience: he doesn't know what the hell is going on but slowly figures [part of] it out.

I wrote the first draft in two days and have spent the last week tweaking it do death, patching holes and refining the language. Even though the story will likely not reach 3000 words, going is a little slow due to the science and the flow of events. Time is a little out of whack out of necessity. The antagonist force operates in a different time space.

Writing this story has been fun and helpful in a couple of ways. First off, it has allowed me to step away from the Head on a Stump story so I can return to it with a clear, fresh mind. Work on that had gotten a little too much like work. The more I write (generally) the more I can detect when I'm in an ineffective state of mind. Secondly, it has been fun to write outside my normal genre. Sci-fi is not something I've attempted to do before. Fortunately, the POV allows me to get away with not having to know too much about what's going on from a technical standpoint. As I've alluded to above, for most of the story, the protagonist is baffled and even when he does start to catch on, it's mainly deductive reasoning, not a textbook on how time-shift works. Finally, there are elements about this story that are inadvertently serving as study for some of the weird time handling I'm planning for Head on a Stump. Practicing keeping track of events on an alternate fabric here should prove useful when I get into the later stages of that story.