Tips for Time Travel
How novelist Timothy Janovsky's favorite fantasy films inspired his new rom-com.
Hello from hiatus! I hope you are well. Updates: I’m preparing to release No Crying in Baseball into the wild and shall return with regular letters next month. In the meantime, please give a warm welcome to my friend Timothy Janovsky, the author of three delightfully clever romantic comedies: Never Been Kissed, You’re a Mean One, Matthew Prince, and New Adult, which hits shelves today. (To grab a copy, visit Bookshop.org or your other favorite book retailer.) Timothy has written a guest post for You’ve Got Mail: The Substack, with his thoughts on crafting a time-travel story that follows convention yet feels fresh and unique. Without further ado…
I often describe myself as pieces of bubblegum pop culture stacked on top of one another inside a fashionable trench coat. Every once in a while, one piece of pop culture climbs its way to the top of the tower, pokes its head out the collar and begs to be revisited.
When it came time to pitch the third novel in my Boy Meets Boy series—a trio of new adult romantic comedies including the slow-burn Never Been Kissed and the Christmas-themed You’re a Mean One, Matthew Prince—I couldn’t shake the notion that I wanted to, this time around, put a magical twist on the contemporary, queer romance.
As I searched for inspiration, I did a roll call of all the media that made me. Three films popped out more than the rest: 13 Going on 30 (the Jennifer Garner/Mark Ruffalo time jump vehicle from 2004), Freaky Friday (the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis body-swap comedy remake from 2003), and Big (Penny Marshall’s masterpiece starring Tom Hanks that came out before I was even born). Each plays by the same whimsical rules when it comes to magic, hijinks and meditations on time and aging. I studied those rules to write Nolan Baker, the struggling stand-up comedian at the center of New Adult, and his journey toward self-realization, love and forgiveness.
To time travel like the pros in the movies, you need…
A Talisman
Basically, no trip through time would be possible without a talisman—something with mystical powers that thrusts our main characters into another reality. In 13 Going on 30, Jenna Rink always wanted a Barbie Dreamhouse (so on-brand in 2023! Thanks, Greta and Margot!); for her 13th birthday, next-door neighbor Matty Flamhaff builds her a Jenna’s Dreamhouse instead. It comes complete with a bubble bath, every record ever made, and “that bum Rick Springfield loafing on the couch.” To top it all off, Matty sprinkles it with her talisman: magic wishing dust.
Twelve-year-old Josh Baskin from Big stumbles upon his talisman at a carnival by accident. It’s a coin-operated fortune-telling-machine named Zoltar that works (almost too well) despite not even being plugged in.
Freaky Friday uses a matching pair of meddlesome fortune cookies to instigate its magic.
New Adult’s Nolan Baker gets his talisman as a wedding favor. It’s a set of healing crystals from a popular wellness company named Doop. The crystals in consort are meant to “manifest your ideal future” (whatever that’s supposed to mean).
But a talisman alone is not enough to create wibbly-wobbly time. You also need to make…
A Wish
If you were alive during the early 2000s, you’ve surely heard the phrase “30 and flirty and thriving,” which young Jenna utters in the famous “seven minutes in heaven” scene from 13 Going on 30. Inspired by her favorite fashion magazine, Poise, she has this illusion that her life will be perfect and she’ll be popular once she’s a grown woman with independence and a hot boyfriend.
Likewise, a yearning Josh Baskin states: “I wish I were big.” Big enough to go places without his parents embarrassing him. Big enough to impress a girl. Big enough to ride the Super Loops at the carnival. Everything would be better with a few more years and inches on him.
“I’m going to make one final attempt to understand what goes on inside your head,” says Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess in Freaky Friday. “Ugh. Don’t treat me like one of your patients, Mom!” responds Lohan (her movie daughter, Anna) referencing Tess’s job as a psychiatrist and author of Through the Looking Glass: Senescence in Retrograde. (We know she’s a good shrink because—wow! That title alone!) Soon afterward, a Chinese restaurant owner passes by and offers the two their talismans, which contain the fortune: “A journey soon begins. Its prize reflected in another’s eyes… .” This eerily echoes Tess’s wish to understand Anna, no?
My novel’s hero, Nolan, sets his “intentions” (a.k.a. makes his wish) on the set of healing crystals to be “successful, happy, and universally loved… .” Oh, and also to prove everyone who has ever doubted him wrong! Because, hey, you’re not really in your early twenties if you don’t have a slight chip on your shoulder!
A wish, however, still isn’t enough. You need…
A Transformation
If you’re an avid film watcher, you know that characters who go unchanged over the course of three acts are not the most compelling to watch onscreen. What’s fun about these three movies is that the protagonists’ changes are all mental, physical and hilariously absurd. Jenna wakes up 17 years in the future as a high-powered magazine editor at Poise with a luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment and a hunky hockey player boyfriend. Josh awakes in his tiny bunk bed—still in the same year—but he’s morphed overnight into a fully grown adult man. Tess and Anna wake up in each other’s bodies. Talk about a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Nolan’s wish has him waking up much like Jenna—in a luxury apartment, beside a hot-as-hell man, with a Netflix stand-up special in the works. Except instead of 17 years, it’s been seven. Like Josh, his future body is nearly unrecognizable. (Botox?! Abs?! It’s high stakes Rent the Runway, for sure.) He even has his own Anna-inspired “I’m old! Oh, I’m like the crypt keeper!” moment when he realizes he’s 30. ACTUALLY THIRTY! Basically, a dinosaur to gay men. Which means he’s promptly off in search of his best friend (and almost lover) Drew Techler to help him get back to his original timeline and body ASAP—that is, if Drew doesn’t totally despise Nolan for the huge mistake he made at 23.
Physical transformations are the catalysts that lead to the final piece of the wibbly-wobbly time puzzle…
A Lesson
Yes, we may think lessons are exclusive to children’s media—meant for fables and generic platitudes spoken by CGI animals. But I’d argue that, more than anyone and now more than ever, adults have lessons to learn too. Being an adult is messy and complicated and finding empathy and love for those around us can be hard when we’re juggling finances, relationships and the dumpster fire that is the modern news cycle. It’s easy to lose sight of what’s important to us by hyper-focusing on our own overwhelming experiences and desires. While I don’t want to spoil any of the lessons learned from this time-bender trifecta in case you haven’t yet seen them (but if you haven’t…I mean, come on! What are you waiting for?!), I will say that we, the viewers, find catharsis in the moments where a character sheds their old ways and is on-track for a brighter future.
New Adult is a romance novel, which means a Happily Ever After is guaranteed by the time you close the book, but there are plenty of stumbling blocks in Nolan and Drew’s way as they make it to that final, delicious kiss-before-the-credits. That, to me, is what makes the wibbly-wobbly time journey so, so fun.
For Timothy’s full New Adult watch-alike movie list, which also includes When Harry Met Sally, check out his letterboxd. And if you’re on Instagram, you can follow him here.
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