Time Travel and Gardens: Recipe for Danger, Guest Poster Marlene Dotterer

In my bid to help out authors with promoting their books, I want to introduce to you a good writing friend of mine, Marlene Dotterer. She and I met on the Online Writers Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (OWW). She was one of the few who helped me with THE SAINTS OF BELVEDERE ROAD, and her input was most valued. Now, she’s promoting her book SHIPBUILDER, a novel about…well, why don’t I let her tell you about it!

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A big “Thank You” to Darke, for hosting me! I’m glad to meet all of her readers and chat about my new book.

I’m a sucker for time travel stories. Always have been. I saw the movie Brigadoon when I was about four, and the magical, “out-of-time” aspect of it thrilled me to the core. This is what fascinates me about time travel. What would it be like to live in a different time? Future or past, it doesn’t much matter. It would all be so strange.

So it’s not really unexpected, that my first novel would be a time travel story. I wanted to write about Thomas Andrews, and I wanted to give him a chance to save the Titanic, so time travelers seemed like the perfect answer. But I didn’t want it to be the usual, “let’s go back in time and warn the captain about the iceberg” kind of thing. That’s been done.

And done again.

In fact, when I started the book, I knew it could be a series, and the series would be about the time travel, sort of like Quantum Leap, but without the “set things right” mentality. Time travelers may not always know how to fix things, and sometimes, their “fixes” make things worse. No, my idea is to explore the weirdness of living in another time. What’s different? What mistakes will a time traveler make? What happens if people find out about them? Will they be killed? Imprisoned? Used by powerful people for gain?

In TTJ: Shipbuilder, I spend a few chapters showing how hard it is for Casey and Sam to adjust to life in 1906. Even though they’ve read about the time period in history books, the day-to-day aspects of survival are huge obstacles. They have no money and no supplies. Their clothes are all wrong. They don’t know anyone, and there are horses and carriages running all over a town that is both completely strange and eerily familiar.

In that situation, survival is not a given.  But even later, after a couple of years of living in the past, they still get tripped up by unexpected rules or social mores. I think it’s fairly obvious that Casey would have a hard time adjusting to, and even remembering, all the restrictions on women, for example.

But how can planting gardens get her into trouble?

When the gardens in question stir the bubbling pot of animosity between Catholics and Protestants, that’s how.

Big trouble. And she never saw it coming.

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Book Blurb:

Imagine being there before the Titanic set sail.

Now imagine being there before she’s even built.

Sam Altair is a physicist living in Belfast, Ireland. He has spent his career researching time travel and now, in early 2006, he’s finally reached the point where he can send objects backwards through time. The only problem is, he doesn’t know where the objects go. They don’t show up in the past, and no one notices any changes to the present. Are they creating alternate time lines?
To collect more data, Sam tries a clandestine experiment in a public park, late at night. But the experiment goes horribly wrong when Casey Wilson, a student at the university, stumbles into his isolation field. Sam tries to rescue her, but instead, he and Casey are transported back to the year 1906. Stuck in the past, cut off from everyone and everything they know, Sam and Casey work together to help each other survive. Then Casey meets Thomas Andrews, the man who will shortly begin to build the most famous ship since Noah’s Ark. Should they warn him, changing the past and creating unknown consequences for the future?

Or should they let him die?

Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/84342

Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travel-Journals-Shipbuilder-ebook/dp/B005JU99NA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314819141&sr=8-1

Amazon estore for the paperback version: https://www.createspace.com/3616600

Must Have Give-Aways!

Ships are launched with a bottle of champagne. My book is about a ship, so…

Actually, perhaps it’s best if I don’t try to mail anyone a bottle of champagne. But how about a free book? (Free Book? SWEET!! ~Darke~)

Throughout the blog tour, I’ll keep track of everyone who leaves a comment on any of the blogs and enter them into a drawing. At the end of the tour, I’ll pick three winners, each to receive an autographed copy of The Time Travel Journals: Shipbuilder.

So, read on! Comment!

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Marlene Dotterer grew up as a desert rat in Tucson, Arizona. In 1990, she loaded her five children into the family station wagon, and drove north-west to the foggy San Francisco Bay Area. To stay warm, she tackled many enterprises, earning a degree in geology, working for a national laboratory, and running her own business as a personal chef. She’s a frustrated gardener, loves to cook, and teaches natural childbirth classes. She says she writes, “to silence the voices,” obsessed with the possibilities of other worlds and other times.

She is married to The Best Husband in the World, and lives in Pleasant Hill, California.

Her website is http://marlenedotterer.wordpress.com/