When Past, Present, and future Collide…
Welcome to the landing page for book one in my Time Travel Trilogy, But World Enough and Time. Below are the links to most of the places where you can buy your own copy. It runs about 420 pages, and costs $16.99 in paperback and $3.99 in ebook.
Synopsis
Robin Parker does not know what to make of her brother Dean’s discovery in the old English castle, namely a strangely modern room with a young woman named Elizabeth inside dressed like she’s from the 17th Century. The equipment looks like it could be a suspended animation set-up, and when Robin sends herself to the future from one of the modules, she realizes that Elizabeth has been on suspended animation for almost 500 years, put there by a “magician” named Roger.
The three escape the room with a portable time machine in hand, but it’s soon clear that Elizabeth is not up to life in the 21st Century. Robin is also dying to travel back in time, so she makes the decision to take Elizabeth back to England in the 1640s, with Dean in tow. They land in a village similar to Elizabeth’s home so as to avoid Roger finding her again. What they don’t realize is that there’s another traveler from the future – one who is determined to take Elizabeth at all costs.
How I wrote But World Enough and Time
The title is based on the first live of the 17th Century poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” by Andrew Marvell.
Had we but world enough and time/This coyness, lady, were no crime.
Marvell, of course, is trying to get his girlfriend to, well, succumb, by pointing out that they don’t have eternity to play games, just the present.
But what if we did? What if we have all the time in the world and then some? What if we really could see history as it really happened? That is the temptation and fun of time travel, and this one actually happened as the result of the very first book I wrote – a novelization of the fairy tale Cinderella, which I wrote my sophomore year of high school. By the way, my book A Ring for a Second Chance was the sequel to that.
After playing around with the cinder girl, I was ready to play with another fairy tale, but this one would happen in modern times. There was a girl asleep in a castle and a handsome young man carried away by his sense of romance and…
Well, I didn’t get very far with that until I was just out of college and had written most of the Operation Quickline series. For some reason that old scenario came back to haunt me. If it was going to be set in modern times, then time travel would have to be the vehicle for the story.
My two girlfriends, Susanna Apitz and Stephanie Beverage, agreed to help. Stephanie, in particular, was finishing up at UCLA with her history degree, and she’s why Elizabeth comes from the 17th Century. My trip to Bath right after I graduated with my master’s degree also played a part.
What it became
The story has, of course, grown through several rewrites. Much of what became the sequel Time Enough was actually from the latter section of the original book. The final book in the trilogy has been in its early stages since I wrote this first one, but is now being written.
Robin became more of the main character with the first draft, but Roger was something of a bad guy. Until he morphed into something else altogether. Still not sure how that happened. And the characters are still morphing and growing. In Time Enough, Elizabeth is showing more moxie than I would have thought possible as she faces the terrors of our time. And Robin is developing a couple chinks in her armor that I didn’t know she had.
But it all started here, with bits that I could never have seen becoming important.
Oh, and one other problem. When I originally wrote the book, I created a machine with smooth glass with keys that were under it, but reacted when you touched them. If that sounds familiar, it’s because between now and then, they invented touch screens. Phooey. Which is why I am done with writing about the future. Until the next set of characters grab my mind.