While writing additional draft chapters soon after completing my original draft novel I thought about adding some variety to the story by describing the director of the Pumpkin taking a holiday elsewhere. Following the conventional writers’ rule “write about what you know” I chose the Assynt region of Scotland where my wife and I had spent a couple of pleasant holidays many years ago and had once sat in a restaurant watching wild salmon leaping in the river just outside the window. I had plenty of recollections from our holidays but also did some research on the area to get more material and was surprised to discover that there was a large cave system there. Furthermore one of the largest caves in the system had been named “The Great Northern Time Machine” for some unimaginable reason. The complete skeleton of a bear had been found in it but nobody had any idea how the animal could have got that deep into the system dead or alive, much of it being flooded and only accessible to cave divers. This cave is described as being huge and photographs of it show a domed roof. I checked further and found that none of the information about these caves had been available when we were in that region, which was why I had never been aware of them before.
I abandoned the idea of writing that chapter. I couldn’t possibly mention a real place where a “time machine” under a domed roof accessible only through underground tunnels just like the fictional Pumpkin actually existed and creatures like bears had appeared in the past by unexplained means just as that previously mentioned warthog had in the Pumpkin in the past in my novel. Anyway two time machines had already collided in my novel and another would have been one too many. It would have looked as though I had written the chapter just for that reason to seem clever. Clearly my story was meant to remain within the confines of my own imaginary time machine as it predominantly had in the original draft. Maybe it had never been the real intention for me to include this story in my fiction writing though but rather here, as I now have.