I have spent some time fleshing out my view of the world of Eric Stapleton. For me, the most effective way to accomplish this world building has been to write about it. After several trial runs that did not work out as I wanted, I have ended up taking the tact that Eric is keeping a journal that exposes the essential aspects of my world building.

My intent is that the material in these entries will inform the contents of the novel. I am writing about a world that I have thought about at some length and the expectation is that the contents of these entries will seep through and color that writing. Certainly, the revisions that I have made in existing material reflects the “insights” gained by writing these entries.

My current intention is that I will also include these entries as additional chapters in the novel, but that intention has to survive the final assembly of the novel out of all of the bits and pieces that I have been churning out.

Here is the list of entries in the journals of Eric Stapleton. As I add the pages to hold the individual entries, the titles will become links.

• Beginnings — starting the journal, with musings on the totality of surveillance.
• A Refined and Cultured Man — notes on the various cultures encountered by Eric, with some commentary on abundance and the blind dependence on the machines.
• An Introduction to Time Travel — the basics of how time travel works in the world of Eric Stapleton.
• Do You Know Who I Am? — how identity and privacy interact in this world.
• The Strange Case of Branching Time — advanced topics in time travel.
• The Mapping of the Time Line — an obsession about knowing what happened in all of the “whens” of the time line.
• Shaking the Four Pillars of the Arisa — some historical notes, up close and personal.
• Time Threads: Explaining the Inexplicable — notes on the second form of time travel.
• The Teleological Aspects of Time Travel — notes on inconvenient facts surrounding time travel.
• Hermes Grossman: The Invisible Giant — notes on the invention of the third form of time travel.