It's About Time!

Yesterday, I finished the Time Travel book, THROUGH THE GARDEN GATE. I don't know why this took so long. It's only 20,000 words. Really short by fiction standards. One-third of a small category romance. But it seemed to go on forever.

For one thing, I made a major change to it halfway through which required me to go all the way back to the beginning and make adjustments. I didn't mind that so much because the changes really make the story a lot better. I just wish I would have thought of it the first time through. But I'm a Seat-of-the-Pants writer. I don't know when I start out what's going to happen. Some people like to have everything very carefully plotted before they begin. To me, that takes a lot of the fun out of it. I like to find out as we go along, just as if I were reading it. And as Stephen King says, I am the first reader of this particular book. Plotting it first takes away the joy of finding out for me.

I will admit to shedding a tear during the last scene. At least I know I connected on an emotional level with ONE reader. Even if it is me.

What I found fascinating about this one was all the ways TIME played a role in the story. First she was out of her normal Time Zone. She couldn't talk to her NY office when she first got up in England. They weren't there yet. She suffered from jet lag the first day and slept a long TIME when she got settled in.

Then, after she went through the portal to a different TIME, a lot of things happened that depended on TIME. Towards the end, they're racing to a destination to find someone in TIME to fix something, and she's watching the hands on the clock moving forward in TIME.

When I was in high school, I fancied myself a folk singer. We all did. It was the Sixties. I remember a TIME sitting on my bed, playing my guitar, singing TIME by the Pozo Seco Singers. "Time, oh, time. Where did you go? Time, oh, good, good, time, where did you go?"

My grandfather happened down the hall as I was singing, poked his head in my bedroom door and said, "Yeah. Where did time go?"

He would have been about seventy-five at the TIME. He lived into his eighties.

Well, I'd like to go on and on about this book and about TIME but that's it for today. I'm running out of blog TIME. See you tomorrow. If you've got the time.

Susan