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What is time? If you were to write a story that involved time travel – what rules would you incorporate into it?

Some examples I can think of on time rules:

The Grandfather Paradox: deals with the consequences of what if a man goes back in time and kills his own grandfather.

Can Not Occupy Same Space: This is a rule from the Jean Claude Van-Damn movie Time Cop in which you can’t occupy the same space, which means that you can not touch your past self or really bad things happen.

Seven Days: From the 1998 show of the same name staring Jonathan LaPaglia, in which the lead character can only travel backward in time a set distance – seven days.

Lifetime Travel: This one is from one of my favorite Scott Bakula stories, Quantim Leap, in which the lead character can only travel in time within his own lifetime.

Cannot Alter Set Events: a rule that specifies that certain things must happen, a character might be able to travel back and witness an event in history, but they can not stop that event from happening.  Any effort to change history merely shifts things a little and, one way or another, the event still happens.

So, what rules might you come up with for your own time travel rules?

Sit for a few moments and think about the action of waiting.  What do people do when they are waiting?  Do they fidgit? Pace? Hum Show Tunes?

Take a few minutes to think about all the variable ways in which someone might wait, then get a timer and set it for fifteen minutes.  Write, for fifteen minutes, on the subject of waiting.

Any character, any setting, just so long as it is about waiting for something or someone or… Maybe your subject is a writer that is waiting for the clock to tick down to zero?

I went out riding on my ATV today, the first ride of the summer, and came across a box laying along the side of the road.  It was an old crate, roughly 12″ by 12″ by about 4′ long, that had fallen out of someone’s truck over the winter and tumbled down into the ditch between the road and the ATV trail.

The first time I passed it I was hit with all kinds of musings about “What if I had stopped and looked inside?”  The next time I stopped, looked inside and found… today’s Monday Muse.

What if your character were out on a trail and found a crate along side the road?  Would they stop and open it? What would be inside of it? What adventures might the contents of that crate lead them to?

So, what was really in that crate I discovered?  Not much.  Not the rifles or dynamite my muses conjured for an adventure.  No, there was a pile of snow where the box had landed upside down on the snowbank and a half of a cinder block.