Authorpreneur Dashboard – Craig L Seymour
Time Skip
Science Fiction & Fantasy
CURTIS LOVELLE is a happy man with a good life. He adores his wife and young son and couldn't imagine anything better. Then he wakes up eighteen years in the past and finds he has to live his life over again from the age of sixteen. He tries to recreate his life but finds it impossible. Every decision seems to send him off on a new trajectory. Then he realizes that he is uniquely situated to stop the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He resolves to stop the terrorists and quits worrying about retracing his own steps. If he is going to get his wife back he will do it while he tackles this larger mission. Lovelle experiences tremendous highs and lows as he fails at some goals and achieves others. In the end he even gets some things he didn't know he wanted. TIME SKIP is a twist on the typical time travel tale. It's a little bit Sci Fi, a little bit Thriller, and a little bit Alternate History.
Book Bubbles from Time Skip
What would you do with foreknowledge?
There are so many wrongs in the world that need to be righted. So how do you decide where to expend your efforts. I tried to be realistic with how someone would act under the circumstances. Just like myself, the character was in Michigan at the time of the Murrah bombing investigation and the Michigan connection was much in the news. It seemed such an obvious candidate.
Inspiration
As the author of a time travel story,I knew immediately that my protagonist would have to tackle the 9/11 attacks. But with the premise that he was dedicated to restoring his lost life, I needed some impetus that would cause him to change the course of his life. Something had to remind him of that awful day and shake that dedication.
The Importance of the Timeline
Whenever you deal with actual historical events you are adding a challenge to your work. Making these events fit into my creative narrative can be difficult because it isn't what I think about first when writing. The original draft of the Time Skip featured a jump in time from 2010 to 1984 instead of the final 2003 to 1985 skip. This corresponded to my own experience as that was when I began the book, and when I was in school. I had to make the character a year younger to fit with the event in this selection. And since I was changing The timeline, I decided that every essential thing in the novel had occurred by 2003, and the next seven years were just filler. The trick with that change was wiping out references to things from that seven years. It's amazing how much can change in a few years.
Teen angst
Although my book is hardly autobiographical (Curtis Lovelle bares very little resemblance to me), I did draw heavily on my own experiences in writing about his teen years. I've always heard that you should write about what you know, and what do we know better than our own lives. The trouble is reigning it in. The first draft of Time Skip featured so much of Lovelle's personal life it didn't look like the thriller it was intended to be. In the end I edited much of it out to get the balance right.
Prologue as spoiler
As a reader I've never been a fan of opening chapters that reveal too much about where the story is headed. After realizing that so many paths to publishing and selling a book utilize only the first chapter or a sampling of early pages I decided to drop this hint of the story to come.
