In Rewinding Time, Darcy and Elizabeth each separately find a potion that lets them travel backward in time one hour. The idea came from the 1988 short play Sure Thing, by David Ives, in which the two characters, Betty and Bill, meet by
chance in a café. The pair strike up a conversation, and every time
the conversation threatens to go awry, a bell rings and the conversation
is reset to the point just before the problematic interaction. The play
concludes with Betty and Bill falling in love.

The 1993 movie Groundhog Day is based on a similar idea, but there are already plenty of Groundhog Day stories out there, and I didn’t want to write another one. One of the things I liked better about Sure Thing was that the resets were immediate; in some cases the conversation would take a wrong turn and the bell would ring within seconds. But I also wanted to give Darcy and Elizabeth agency over the process, which is why they each have a bottle of the potion so they can decide when to use it.

I enjoy stories with limited magic. I like it when the world of fiction mostly works the way the “real world” works. The setting of Rewinding Time is the fictional Regency England of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, which means I want readers to be able to assume that what they know about the characters and setting of Pride & Prejudice is true unless explicitly stated otherwise.