Photo/Valle Blanche, by Lars Sunsdstrom.

At a recent writer’s workshop I attended, the presenter suggested to the audience that people who are writers of science fiction or fantasy have a big job to do before they can write. The job is research.

I actually heard gasps of shock and groans of misery as the message sunk in to the collective psyche of the audience.

In order for the novel to be successful, the readers need to have a suspension of disbelief. The readers must have sound evidence and logical explanations for the outlandish things happening in a book. Otherwise, they won’t believe a word on the pages, they won’t buy into the story, and they will ring a death knell for the unfortunate author who didn’t do her research.

In August I began writing my novel, Jynx, You’re It, about a girl who time travels to save her father and forty-four children from an evil egomaniac. In September, it became abundantly clear to me that I needed to do some extensive research into how time travel works before I could continue with the plot. So I spent the month of October reading.

I read Michio Kaku’s book, Physics of the Impossible, I took an unaccredited course in the logic of time travel from an online university, and I read academic papers produced by theoreticians at well-respected California think tanks. Yes, there are actual academic papers on the topic of time travel. And I daydreamed. I daydreamed quite a bit, actually.

My mind was consumed with time travel situations and problems all through November. It was the topic of dinner conversation more nights than I care to recount. I spent all of my NaNoWriMo writing time creating not a novel, but rather, creating my own personal thesis of how things work in the physics of time travel. I imagined this is how a goddess feels, creating her own version of reality.

By the time I had all my thoughts down on paper, clearly defined and delineated by my month of research, I was ready to write the rest of the book. While the book had stalled in September, because my ideas were undefined, in December I finished writing the novel in two weeks. The research paid off. The story flowed. And I was off for winter break so I could write all day.

January, February, and most of March were spent revising and editing, filling out some parts and cutting others. When my beta readers finished the story, it was a huge relief that there were no comments from anyone about why or how they thought the time travel premise of this book wouldn’t work. They bought into it. They believed it. They suspended disbelief for 39,000 words, to hear the story of the red-headed girl who traveled through time to save her family and her friend’s family.

That, my friends, is what makes writing so rewarding.