Writer's Block: Blast to the past

[seawasp]

What would I tell my 10 year old self?

NOTHING.

Anything I told them would be likely to have unknowable consequences, and almost certainly divert my life enough that I wouldn't marry Kathleen and my kids would never be born.

If my life totally sucked beyond redemption, yeah, there's things I'd tell myself, but it's overall been getting BETTER over the past 15+ years, not worse, so it's not time to screw around with things on that level[Error: unknown template qotd]

Comments

[gary-jordan.livejournal.com]

If I could travel back in time... I wouldn't, unless I had some idea of the consequences. For example, there's Eric Flint's Ring of Fire scenario: My arrival in the past creates a New Universe that splits off from My Old Universe. No paradoxes. I can accidentally kill all my ancestors in the new universe because they aren't the ones who sired my sire and dam.

Then, I might sit down with ten year old me for a chat about Apple and IBM and Amazon and collecting Barbie Dolls, until my parents called the cops on that 60 year-old man chatting with their kid.

At 10 I was in Key West.

[seawasp]

Of course, at that point it's you being purely altruistic; none of the changes in Alt-Gary's life will have any effect on You-Gary.

[gary-jordan.livejournal.com]

That's okay with me - it's not like I'd live to benefit from what little I remember of the stock market, anyway. Heck, IIRC, the market topped 300 when I was a senior in High School, and nobody thought it could maintain those amazing high numbers.

Besides, I watched Butterfly Effect, read Rewind and two dozen other pseudo-time travel novels, saw dozens of Star Trek episodes where Kirk and Company, Picard et al, All Janeway's Children or DS9ers played fast and loose with the temporal prime directive. That's not to mention Babaloney 5 or even Seven Days (I think) or Quantum Sam, setting right what once went wrong.

No. This trip back to talk to one's ten y.o. self is best left to one's eleven y.o. self. Less damage to the timeline, the time traveleur might be believed, and is most likely to have good info for the earlier self. "Dude! Don't pull Jennifer's hair next week. In six months, she's gonna have huge boobs, and she holds a grudge, like, forever!"