The trip of time_brief

Introduction: This is my first original full-length novel based on a dream I had in primary school. It is a fantasy with imaginative stories while reflecting reality with satiric ones at the same time. Although finishing the first draft ten years earlier, I had made revisions every one or two years, adding plots, enriching the content, reflecting my ideology, and making it increasingly satisfying and meaningful.

Brief (story): The whole story is about a girl who accidentally entered a new world called “Time Land” with two “strange” tour guides and all her wonderful experiences there. With the development of the girl’s travel, smaller moving stories of other people she met are told, every one of them reflecting true feelings, social issues, and humanity. The most impressive part of the novel is the final turn of the story, uncovering the fact that the girl is not actually a tourist, but a previous resident of Time land, while the two “tour guides” were actually her grandparents. Instead of her first time to the new world, the girl’s grandparents had been acting as “tour guides” for seven years and the girl had repeated the same travel hundreds of times. The true reason behind the trip is helping the girl——who was only able to keep three days of memory in a cycle——to recover memory. The girl, the previous resident of Time Land, was forced to lose the ability to create memories normally when the ex-president of the land tried to keep his reputation at the expense of giving the girl a risky memory-erasing operation. At the end of the story, the girl finally got her memory back and recognized her grandparents after their ten years of struggle and even became the new president of the land. However, every morning when she visited her grandparents, they continued acting as tour guides——they suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and their memory frequently stayed in the time before their granddaughter’s recovery.

Character: the prototype of the girl is myself, the two “tour guides” are elderly people wearing traditional Chinese clothes, one with long, white hair and the other with short, blond hair.

Concept: The whole land is divided into three parts by the sea. The first heart-looking part is abundant with visitors, the second part surrounding the heart is for residents and symbolic architecture, and the third special part is prohibited for tourists because it was relatively backward and with no high-technology

Architecture: Symbolic buildings in the land are Microtime Museum, Crystal Castle, Waterlily Library, Pancake on the 16th floor, and Sunset Bookstore. The appearance and the interior design of every single building was created elaborately, with the exact layout of all the furniture, the different functions of every floor, and the operation of all the services.

I challenged myself to use different artistic forms to present this work, which is so significant since it marked the start of my writing dream. For instance, I turned some of the typical plots in the book into comics, created paintings for some of the most important scenes, and used a huge map-like painting to show how the story develops, containing various artistic forms such as collage (sticking materials like colored papers and photographs together), watercolor, and colored-pencil art. By using different kinds of strokes and colors for different emotional keynotes, such as happiness, calmness, irony and so on, I gained an even deeper feeling of the expression and the meaning of this early work.