History, Rabbit Holes, and Story Portals: Where My Time-Travel Ideas Begin

Dreams have a pliable logic. Many of my story ideas begin while I’m asleep. In them, time weaves back and forth, places and faces overlap, people from my everyday past (or present) exist in multiple versions of themselves. When I wake up, I’m usually left only with fragments: a singular image, a feeling, perhaps a lingering question or two. Those fragments often become the seeds of something larger in my writing process. As surreal as those beginnings are, I’ve learned that my stories emerge stronger when they are rooted in something tangible as well.

For me, that grounding often comes from a place. The titular twisted festival grounds of my novel Hallow Claware inspired in part by Lakeside Amusement Park, a location I’ve frequented since I was a young child.

The park sits in a very small town (the population as of the 2020 Census was just 16) just outside the familiar rhythms of the city of Denver.

Lakeside pulls at me with its deteriorating yet charming shabby art deco structures, twinkling neon lights, and decades of history (Lakeside has been open since 1908!) I grew up going to Lakeside again and again, watching it shift subtly over time— while somehow staying the same. That kind of place holds layers of memories, eras, echoes of people who came before. For me, Lakeside became more than a setting. It became a portal.

When I’m building time-travel narratives (i.e., stories where the characters voyage to past or future eras) and working on the setting, I habitually launch with a simple question: What was this place like fifty years ago? A hundred? What has changed—and what refuses to? Just as importantly: What might it become fifty or a hundred years in the future? These questions stretch a single location across time, revealing the emotional weight of history and possibility. They allow me to imagine characters as individuals who are part of a continuum.

What about finding inspiration for time- travel plots? Outside of physical spaces, I find myself falling into what I can only describe as vision rabbit holes. I’ll scroll through nostalgia Facebook groups (Lakeside has a very active one), niche forums, or pursue subreddits dedicated to unsolved mysteries, strange historical figures, or forgotten local legends. I find that a single post—half-fact, half-speculation— opens up an entire narrative. Who was that person, really? What’s missing, omitted from the official records of events, be they strange or mundane? What stories never get told, and deserve to be?

Even old newspaper archives have this effect (Here’s where you can find some good ones). There’s something haunting about a short, easily overlooked article—a disappearance, an odd event, a name without context. These fragments of history feel unfinished, almost like they’re waiting for someone to step in and imagine what happened next.

That’s where writing time travel has begun for me: in the impossible, in the nearly forgotten. By anchoring my stories in real places, real questions, and real traces of the past, the strange becomes… believable.

The distance between then and now starts to diminish. Time doesn’t feel like a straight line anymore—it feels like something one can step into, wander through, and perhaps, find something extraordinary there.