@Mendalla I love how you've taken childhood lake mythology and given it that darker edge! There's something perfect about mixing cryptid folklore with kaiju sensibilities—both tap into those primal fears about what lurks beneath familiar surfaces. Still, kaiju brings that element of unstoppable force and inevitable destruction that cryptids usually lack.

The cottage lake setting is brilliant for this. Those summer places have such a specific atmosphere of contained intimacy—you know every rock and swimming spot, but there's still all that dark water stretching beyond where you can see. It's the perfect psychological space for something ancient and terrible to emerge from.

Central Ontario lakes have that particular quality too, don't they? Deep enough to hide things, old enough to have accumulated stories. I bet the contrast between childhood summer nostalgia and monster horror creates some unsettling tonal moments.

Are you playing with the idea that the "joke" lake monster was never really a joke? Or is this more about how family mythology can manifest in unexpected ways? Either way, the combination of personal history and mythological dread sounds like it could hit some powerful emotional notes beneath all that kaiju destruction.

@Mendalla Thank you for the Smashwords mention! You've hit on exactly what drew me to this story—the way time stops being just a narrative mechanism and becomes something with agency and intention.

What's brilliant about The Clock Forgets Me is that it's not time travel in the traditional sense. There's no going backward or forward through linear time. Instead, time itself becomes unreliable in place—clocks keeping different hours in the same house, moments stretching or compressing without warning. It's more like developing a stutter or becoming forgetful over time.

The paradoxes you mention in time travel stories often feel like plot problems to solve. Here, the temporal impossibilities ARE the emotional landscape. When Eileen finds sympathy cards written in her handwriting for losses she doesn't remember, or discovers her notebook filled with entries she never wrote, the "how" matters less than the "why"—why would her mind need to forget something so completely that even time becomes complicit in the erasure?

It feels like the start of something larger. The way memory and time interweave here suggests there's more to explore in this universe where grief can break causality.

A quiet exploration of memory, loss, and the spaces between what we remember and what remembers us

What happens when the clocks in your house start keeping different time?

The Clock Forgets Me follows Eileen Hart, an eighty-year-old woman whose carefully ordered world begins to fracture when the minute hand on her kitchen clock disappears. What starts as a simple mechanical failure becomes something far more unsettling: a story about time itself becoming unreliable, and the memories we bury so deep we forget we ever buried them.

Eileen wakes to rain that doesn't sound right—softer, like fingers tapping against glass from the inside. Her kitchen clock has lost its minute hand entirely, not broken off, just gone, as if it never existed. But the second hand keeps moving, marking time that doesn't add up.

Soon, she discovers sympathy cards written in her handwriting for neighbors she doesn't remember grieving. A man appears claiming to be her son, with DNA evidence and hospital bracelets she doesn't recall. The clocks throughout her house each keep their version of time, and her notebook fills with entries she has no memory of writing.

The sound-first sensory approach. Every scene anchors itself in audio—the rain's wrong rhythm, the tick of clocks out of sync, pages turning in empty rooms. It creates this incredible sense of a world slightly off-kilter, where the familiar becomes foreign through the smallest acoustic details.

Magical realism that feels earned. The fantastic elements grow organically from emotional truth. Time fractures because grief fractures. Memory becomes unreliable because some losses are too large to hold. The magic serves the story's emotional core rather than overwhelming it.

An authentic neurodivergent perspective without tokenization. Eileen's pattern recognition, her careful attention to routine and sound, her methodical approach to documenting anomalies—these aren't presented as quirks but as the way her mind naturally processes an increasingly unstable reality.

The prose moves between lyrical observation and tight cause-and-effect plotting. Sentences that build like music, with consonance and assonance that mirror the story's audio focus. The pacing alternates between moments of quiet reflection and forward momentum, creating this sense of time being both stretched and compressed.

This isn't a story about solving a mystery. It's about choosing what to remember when forgetting has become a survival mechanism. About the courage required to let buried grief surface, even when it threatens the careful structure you've built around its absence.

The ending doesn't tie everything into a neat bow—instead, it offers the promise that some things can be replanted, that gardens can grow from soil that remembers seeds even when the gardener has forgotten planting them.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Emily St. John Mandel's subtle speculative elements

• Literary fiction that doesn't shy away from the strange

• Character-driven narratives about the weight of unprocessed grief

• Stories where neurodivergent perspectives are central, not peripheral

• Magical realism rooted in emotional authenticity

Has anyone else written stories where time becomes a character? I'm fascinated by how the breaking of temporal rules can reveal deeper emotional truths.