If you've ever seen "Back to the Future," you know that the crux of its 1950s plot involves Marty McFly needing to bring his parents together, so that he and his siblings could be born, while avoiding his mother Lorraine's attraction to him. The movie only goes as far as having the two of them kiss, with Marty very uncomfortable about that.

Naturally, the incest writer in me wondered about a version of the plot that goes full incest, where instead of needing to avoid sex with Lorraine, Marty's existence depends on having sex with her, perhaps even becoming his own father.

The first logical objection is that Marty isn't the first born in his family, he has an older brother and sister. So, could I make him his brother's father or have him hang around to conceive his sister and then himself as well? That seemed unwieldy, so I decided against making this story a BTTF fanfic after all. I'm sure someone else has already done it, though.

Also, the main theme I wanted to explore wasn't incest, but an idea that time could prevent paradoxes by compelling time travelers to act in ways that would not change the pre-destined future. And if that meant needing to have sex with someone you otherwise wouldn't pursue (like a relative), so it would be. Could something be immoral if you had no choice?

Because of the time travel focus, I wanted to publish the story in Literotica's Science Fiction section, rather than its Incest one. So, I reduced the degree of incest to a plausibly legal level by making my main character Bill travel further back in time to meet his great-grandmother, instead of his mother. Then he conceives his grandfather and all of his grandfather's siblings, disappearing 25 years after arriving.

To avoid writing a full 25 years of story, I used the mechanism of a journal (an idea also borrowed from the Back to the Future series, where Doc writes Marty a letter that doesn't get delivered for decades) that relates all of those events, but I only have Bill (and the reader) read the first entries, up to the conception of his grandfather, before he gets transported back in time and relives every word that he just read, that included describing that feeling of compulsion.

I still haven't decided if the journal itself is the time machine that sends him back in time. Maybe in a sequel or expansion of the story.

Without having read the rest of the journal, Bill would have more self-will (or at least the appearance of it) for the remainder of the 25 years and I got to avoid writing all of it. Then, when he gets back to his present, he no longer needs to read the rest, because he remembers living the events and writing the journal. I figured that a whole novel filled with "I was once more compelled to..." entries would get rather boring after a while. Instead, this is a short story of just under 5000 words.

When it came time to self-publish, this story didn't really fit with anything else to put it into a collection, so I decided to publish it standalone and make it my one free ebook, although I price it at Amazon's minimum of $0.99 and it still sells some copies. Just enough to pay back the cost of its cover, in fact. At Smashwords, where it's free, it's my most downloaded book, of course.

Have you read it, yet?