These pictures, pictures that represented pivotal moments in US history, stayed up in my classroom for a good chunk of the year as we researched and debated the importance of those events. And one day, just to shake my students up a bit, I asked them what they thought would have happened if Hitler had won World War II. What if that church in Birmingham had never been bombed? What if the Triangle Shirtwaist fire had never happened? What would our world look like today? Would it be better? Or would it be worse?

I went home that day with the idea for Glitch brewing in my imagination. What if time traveling was possible, and what if some of those time travelers went rogue and started meddling in the past in order to alter the future? I started to picture what the school would look like that would train time travelers to catch those criminals, criminals I would later call Butterflies. Throw that idea in with a deep love of Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” where a bumbling time traveler accidentally steps off the designated path and kills a butterfly on an ill-fated T. rex hunt, and you have the start of what would eventually become Glitch. (If you’re shocked that one of my favorite short stories involves dinosaurs . . . you are probably new here. Go check out my Edge of Extinction series and then come back. It’s fine. I’ll wait.)

As much fun as writing about rogue time travelers was, though, I quickly discovered that this book presented a unique problem that was completely absent when my books contained nothing but dinosaurs, floating boys, and Bigfoot. Glitch wasn’t just my story, you see; it was also America’s story, and America’s story wasn’t always pretty. It’s because of this that I made sure the first time you met Regan she was on a mission to preserve the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, not prevent it. Which, let’s be honest, is weird. Shouldn’t we want to right the wrongs of history? Wouldn’t it make sense to correct the injustices of the past and prevent pain? The answer, in my humble opinion, is no. Elliot struggles with this concept, and one of his professors explained it to him like this:

“History isn’t supposed to be pretty. It’s downright repulsive at times, and you don’t have to like it or agree with it to preserve it. But remember that the healthiest forests grow the year after a forest fire, and that without extreme pressure we wouldn’t have diamonds. You can’t hurry history, and you can’t fix an injustice until people recognize that it is one.”