In the department of feeling like you're getting old, I realized that last year marked the 20th anniversary of when I started to write my first book, Tourist Trap.  I didn't finish it until 2004, so it has only been a complete work for 18 years, but it's still weird to think the characters I'm still writing about now in book 3 have existed in some form for over 20 years.  

It's also crazy how much the world can change in the span of 20 years.  I feel like I'm the same person I was back then in a lot of ways, but I wouldn't write that same story now for a variety of reasons.

I often can't help but write in a humorous tone a lot of the time, and humor is something that can really not age well.  I think that's a topic I could devote a whole entry to on its own, and while I still think a lot of Tourist Trap is pretty funny, there are for sure jokes in there that aren't exactly in tune with today's sensibilities.  It was appealing to me at the time to be a little edgy and there were lots of examples of that kind of humor in the pop culture of the day.  I ventured into some areas I really wouldn't set foot into now though.  It's not as appealing to me as it once was to offend anybody.  I've tried nowadays to lean even more into the absurdist humor which was always a big component of it anyway.  Of course, who knows how that will age in another 20 years?

The thing I think that really dates stories though is references to technology.  I remember being aware at the time of not wanting to make too many technological references because even then I didn't necessarily want to set the story in any specific time period.  It was impossible to avoid it completely though.  Early on Zeke is woken up by his phone ringing and all he has is a landline, which were still very common back in 2001.  It didn't occur to me that landlines would more or less completely disappear within the next couple decades.

The single detail that has given me the most fits though, and which I have re-written the most times, occurs almost immediately in Chapter 1.  Like pretty much on page 1.  The story starts off with Dr. Octavius playing a Barry White album to a chicken in an attempt to get her in the mood to mate with a monkey.  The problem is the format in which people listen to music has changed so much during the last 20 years.  Streaming didn't exist back then and even downloading music online was kind of in its infancy.  I believe in my original draft it was a CD player.  Now it might make sense nowadays that Dr. Octavius would be behind the times and own a CD player, but a major point of the whole scene is he's borrowing it from his niece's boyfriend Vance, who shows up and needs it back immediately so he can listen to a new record he just bought.  This whole scenario just isn't something that really happens anymore, but it was a great device for introducing Sarah and Vance and showing what a jerk Vance was.  

I changed it several times in the subsequent years.  I think I referred to it generically as a  stereo for a while and I don't even remember how else I tried to get around it, but I believe most recently I've made it a record player.  It kind of works if you make Vance a vinyl snob, but really the whole scene isn't quite what it once was when I first wrote it because it's just glaringly not of this time.  Part of me thinks the best solution would be to just change it back to a CD player and explicitly state that the scene takes place in 2001.  It would resolve the phone landline issue, too.  But I really wanted to make the timeframe ambiguous when I first wrote it so that would be going against my original intentions.  I guess there's no getting around making compromises sometimes.

Plus I have an aversion to tinkering with the story too much.  It was never officially published, so technically I could change whatever I wanted, but I also feel like it's a record of a certain time and place in my life and I don't want to unrecognizably alter it from what it was.  Also it's hard to say what sort of butterfly effect making a small change here or there might have on the story as a whole.  In some ways it can't help but be a product of its time and it might just have to be a little bit dated.  Everything gets dated if you wait around long enough.