[Free Ideas] The Backwards Beating Heart: A Reverse Love Story

[Kyle]

Free ideas is a topic where I (or anyone else who wants to participate) gives away free ideas I've been holding on to for future books or stories. I've realized that I'm being too precious and, as I get older, I'm forgetting some. So here they are. Enjoy them if you want or steal them for yourself.

This was an idea that I had pretty well planned out and plotted in my head- knowing almost all the story beats from beginning to end. But about six months ago someone published a novel with the same basic premise (although it wasn't a love story).

The story starts out with a girl who's 12 who accidentally killed her brother when she was a child. In the interim, her parents have grown distant and disaffected by it. She meets a 12 year old boy who seems crazily perfect for her. He's charming, but weirdly intense. He seems to know exactly what to say at exactly the right time. But he's also strangely confident and grounded for a 12 year old boy. They spend a week together walking around her small town and sharing their dreams and then he reveals his secret:

He experiences time backwards... kind of. Here's the premise-- every day he goes through the day like we all do- time is linear and starts in the morning and ends at night. But when he falls asleep, he wakes up and it is yesterday. Basically, every time he goes to sleep, he wakes up and experiences the "next" day, but it's actually the day before. So for him, his memories are of everything in the future, but he has no idea what happened in our "past." There's many complicated elements to someone that experiences time this way and it is explored in the book.

Anyhow, they experiment a little and he convinces her that he's telling her the truth- but he also tells her that they are the loves of each other's lives and spend the rest of their lives together, even though he won't give her details. He also tells her that he's going to be taken away by the government the next day, and she shouldn't blame herself-- but she should meet him at a certain location on a certain day four years in the future, and to be prepared to never go back to her parents. She's distraught and tries to find a way to avoid him being taken and-- of course-- tells the wrong person, who tips off the government and then they take him.

Sure enough- four years later she goes to the place and finds him and they go in to hiding- off the grid in upstate NY. He teaches her their own language that no one knows except them. When she asks where he learned it, he explains that she'll teach it to him many years in the future. Other cool shit like that happens. He gets captured again. Some exciting stuff happens. They live together peacefully in the end and then he dies when they're both about 50, not knowing who she is and her having to explain everything to him.

The story is really just a mushy/action/romance story about two lovers who experience their path differently, but with as much passion and intensity as the other-- meeting in the middle where they're both on "equal ground."

I really, really liked this story, but when someone else published a story about a dude that goes to sleep and then wakes up the next morning to "yesterday" (it really is the same premise), it kind of spoiled it for me. The other guy's story isn't a romance or anything, but it's just too close to my premise.