by Keene Ward on April 14th, 2015, 2:47 am
Hey there, Mea! Welcome to Miz!
Liquid time can definitely be confusing. I'll try to explain it, and if it doesn't make sense, feel free to just repeat the question and I'll try again!
So, in a specific timeline, let's say these things happen in chronological order:
You fight a bear, you get into a fight at a bar, you make love to someone, you get a serious injury.
With liquid time, you can write each of these events in any order:
you get a serious injury, you get into a fight at a bar, you fight a bear, you make love to someone.
With the time stamps, you then are able to clearly outline where each of these events belongs in your character's timeline. Liquid time can be really useful for relatively unrelated encounters. Say, you want to thread with three different people in three different capacities? Liquid time would allow you to write with all three people at the same time. The time stamping would simply denote that what is happening is not happening all at the same time. So you thread with PC A on the third, PC B on the eighth, and PC C on the eleventh. Then, it's chronologically in order!
Something you should always take into consideration, however: If you're writing a thread in which a serious injury occurs, that injury will be present in any threads after that date. If your character dies in a thread before other threads you're currently writing/have written, those threads will become null and void.
This doesn't happen very often, but it can happen, so I just wanted to point that out.
Hopefully that makes a little more sense! Let me know if you still need some clarification. I'm happy to help!