By Debbie De Louise
I’ve been a fan of time-travel tales since I was young. Perhaps my fascination with these stories started with A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle that I read as a child, or maybe it happened later after I read the Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger or Time and Again by Jack Finney, two of my favorite books. Whatever caused my interest, it spurred me to write Time’s Relative, my first novel back in 1998. Although, I tried to publish it, I gave up after receiving one rejection and put the manuscript away.
It wasn’t until 2007, after my cat, Floppy died, that I started writing again and published my first book, Cloudy Rainbow, a paranormal romance. This book, like my time-travel tale, included Floppy as a character. However, instead of traveling through time, the characters communicated with the dead via a computer’s virtual world. Since the book, published by a self-publishing company, didn’t sell widely because I was inexperienced with marketing and promotion, I once again stopped writing. But at the prompting of a patron at the library where I worked who’d read my book, I started another that I found a publisher for in 2015. That book, A Stone’s Throw, became the first in my Cobble Cove cozy mystery series featuring a librarian and a library cat who solve murders in the small, fictional town of Cobble Cove. The series now consists of five full-length books available as paperbacks and eBooks as well as a story series of four eBooks. I’ve also written 3 standalone mysteries and short stories of various genres in anthologies and continue to publish 1 to 3 books per year.
Last year, when I was working from home during the pandemic, I went through some old writing files and found the manuscript for Time’s Relative. I also found the computer file. Looking through it, I decided to edit and update it. As I began the process, I realized that what I’d written about 1998 was authentic to that period and should be kept along with events that transpired since then including COVID 19. When I’d made the changes, I submitted the manuscript to one of my current publishers, and Next Chapter sent me a contract for it. I was excited to know that my time-travel tale would finally appear in print.
Even though time-travel isn’t yet possible and may never be, books allow us to travel to other places and times. The allure of time travel is that many people want to know what will happen in the future or want to change something from their past.