"Ford Prefect is dead" is probably my favorite first line of a fic that I have ever written. It was the first line I wrote down before figuring out pretty much of the rest of the plot.
WOM started out as an ordinary time loop, and it was going to stay that way until I realized that I had no idea where to take it beyond "Would that be fucked up or what?" which was not my goal for the story.
The original plan was for the timeline to "reset" after Earth's destruction in MH and for Arthur to have amnesia and for Ford to still remember everything, but then I realized that I thought that would be lame. I wanted to write about discrepancies in memory between two heavily involved-in-some-sort-of-way characters, yes, but I realized that I didn't want to do it through plain old amnesia because I thought it wouldn't be hitchhiker-y enough.
So, I needed Ford to die.
But not really. I just needed him to be confused in his own way, too, so I made him figure out what was going on later than he would have under the original premise, in which he figured out that the timeline had "reset" pretty quickly. But just resetting the timeline also wasn't hitchhiker-y enough to me.
After listening to Quintessential again after mulling over MH, I figured I could plausibly inflict upon Arthur (and Ford, to an extent) the effects of a head injury without actually giving either of them a proper head injury. I also remembered that Ford had been convinced he was dead after the time journey to Milliways, so time travel it was.
The rest of the writing process is kind of a blur other than the fact that:
I might add more to this page if I remember anything else.
For now, here are some assorted questionably fun facts: