Getting Into Character
One of the really scary things about
publishing a novel is having friends and family read it. My worst fear: that my nearest and dearest
are looking at Time Runs Away With Her like
a high school yearbook, searching for that cool shot of themselves in the 11th
grade. After all, the main setting is
1970. And we’re all prone to
nostalgia. I keep writing emails and
Facebook postings: No, dear high school friend! The heroine’s BFF is NOT YOU. You
were MUCH cooler (and my high school BFF totally was).
Or no, we were buddies in college and I did use your first name, but the male
romantic lead is NOT YOU. (He does get
lucky, though. Oh, so you like that. Thought you would.)
I worry that they all think I doth
protest too much.
I doth not, though. I know just how
the story came to be. Time travel
because I wanted to be able to do it.
Who wouldn’t? 1970 because it was
an amazing year: the Woman’s Movement gathering steam, a bloody war in Vietnam,
and all-out-nuclear-heck still pretty darn possible. The world was dark and
glittering. Stephen King has said that
he knows he’s onto a good narrative when he finds himself putting himself to
sleep thinking about it. I did that
while I was drafting Time Runs Away With
Her, so I really hope he’s right!
But the characters. Yeah, Juuulia, the heroine’s mother, shares
some stuff with my own mom. She’s smart and
strong and frustrated. She should have
had a music career. Juuulia was a tiger
mother before the term existed—and my mom was, too. My mom gave me her best and her best was
fierce. But when I see Juuulia sitting
in her mid-century modern furniture in her drafty Victorian house with all the
woodwork painted a severe charcoal grey, that’s not the woman who bore and
raised me. That’s Juuulia. Juuulia showed up when I was writing the
book. Oh—the extra “u’s” in her
name? That’s because you have to say it
like Julia Child would have. Read the
book. You’ll find out why.
Likewise my heroine, Bean
Donohue. Her hair’s red as a shout-out
to Anne of Green Gables, but she
finds herself at a Grateful Dead Concert in February of 1970. OK, so I WAS at that show, but I didn’t
attempt to time travel out of the Fillmore East ladies’ room that night. And I did (still do) sing and play guitar,
but Bean’s better than I was. Like, a
LOT. And I think she’s a bunch cooler
than I would have been about developing what amounts to a super power at age
16. Thing is, I believe in Bean maybe
more than I believe in me. That’s what
kept me revising and workshopping and submitting until I found Time Runs Away With Her a home at
Evernight Teen. Bean is real. She’s just not Christine Potter.
There’s a setting that’s so powerful
in my book that’s it’s almost a character itself: The too-gothic-for-words-and-very-
haunted Deerwood Main. It’s a huge
mansion built by an 19th century industrialist for his family and
his second wife in a mish-mash of crazy architecture and Hudson River
views. The place has a real-world
inspiration: Estherwood at Master’s School in Dobbs Ferry, NY. But I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t think I’ve ever been inside
Estherwood. Like Bean, I was a townie
and went to public school. The interiors
just kind of showed up when I was writing.
Like Juuulia. And Bean. I don’t know much about Master’s School,
outside of the fact that some of us swore it was haunted back in my high school
years. But Deerwood? I’ve spent tons of time there, both in 1970
and the late 19th century.
That’s because writing about time
travel is about as good as actually getting to do it. And I hope like crazy
that holds true for READING about time travel in Time Runs Away With Her. You’ll
be the judge of that! So why not find out right now?
** ** ** ** **
Time Runs
Away with Her
Christine
Potter
Time Travel Romantic Suspense, 74k
Time Travel Romantic Suspense, 74k
Zak, her
almost-boyfriend, will get drafted if he doesn’t get into art school, pot makes
Bean paranoid, and her best friend can’t stop talking about sex. 1970’s not for
wimps—but neither was 1885...or 1945. So why does Bean keep sliding backwards
in time?
Excerpt:
…Suzanne’s black turtleneck was
pulled all the way up to her nose, and her shoulders were hunched. She was memorizing French vocabulary words
and twirling a strand of her stick-straight, chestnut-colored hair around a
finger. Bean began to fold the corner
of a loose-leaf page back and forth so that she could tear it off without
making any noise: a note.
That’s when the library’s double doors banged open hard enough to bounce
on the wall behind them. Bean heard Miss
Webber draw her breath in––not quite a gasp, but almost––all the way across the
room.
It was Zak. Bean put a hand over her mouth to hide an
instant grin. Miss Webber, maybe a
little embarrassed at being startled, set down the paperwork she had been doing
and looked over her gold-rimmed glasses at him.
On Zak’s head was an old-fashioned fedora, an index card with the word
PRESS handwritten in big letters in its hatband: a press pass, like a black and
white movie’s newspaper reporter. His long hair looked silly and wonderful
underneath it.
“Mr. Grant,” said Miss Webber. “Do you have a pass?” That’s when the laughing started. Not hard,
nasty laughter, like when a dumb teacher gets taken in by a prank, but happy laughter. Kids liked Miss Webber, even though she was
so old that no one could guess her real age.
She wore a bun at the back of her neck the way you’d expect a librarian
to. Her hair was a brownish, grayish
no-color. But Bean bet it went all the
way down her back when she brushed it out at night.
“Touché, Madame,” said Zak. Then, without speaking, he took the fedora
off his head, and set it before her on the desk. He pointed at the hand-lettered PRESS card in
the hatband, and pantomimed taking pictures of Miss Webber with an imaginary
camera. Miss Webber laughed, which was
not something that happened incredibly often.
“A hall pass, Mr. Grant,” she
said. He pulled a small pink piece of
paper out of his army jacket. She
examined it. She still looked amused.
She stretched her arm out before her, the hall pass between two fingers, and
Zak retrieved it, bowing deeply. Instead of putting it back in his jacket, he
tucked it into his hatband with the PRESS pass, and put the hat back on his
head, adjusting its brim low on his forehead.
He spun around dramatically and scanned the library. Bean put her head down and stared at her book
to protect herself from disappointment if she was wrong, but she suspected he
was looking for her. She held her breath for a minute, looked up, and Zak was
halfway to her table.
“Grant,” said someone in a low voice as he walked by. Zak ignored it and dropped into the chair
next to Bean. Suzanne snuck a quick glance at Bean over the top of her French
book. Zak’s army jacket smelled like the outdoors: winter air and fireplace
smoke.
“Hi,” he whispered to Bean.
“Hi,” she whispered back. She wanted to giggle so much that her face
hurt. She turned a few pages, looking
for another Scarlet Letter
quotation. When she’d finished writing
one down, she peeked back at Zak. His
Algebra Two book was in front of him, and he was unfolding a piece of
paper. He produced a Rapidograph, used
it to jot down an equation, and began to solve it.
Bean felt giddy. She reread what she’d just written in her
notebook, but then a shadow fell across the page: Zak’s arm.
“Was stuff at home okay?” he wrote on the page
across from her English notes. He began
to doodle a shining sun face wearing a fedora next to what he had written.
“Sort of,” wrote Bean. “My mother
is a...”
“Big Mamma!” wrote Zak, and drew a plump woman in a bikini reclining
under the sun face. Bean’s mom wasn’t especially fat, but the picture was
funny. Bean laughed silently and glanced up at Zak, not meaning to stare
straight into his eyes. How had she not noticed the color of his
eyes before? They were steely blue.
Suzanne closed her French book to watch.
Bean felt herself blush, and tried to go back to The Scarlet Letter.
A few minutes later, Bean heard more fine-point pen scratching. She
pretended not to notice. On the back of
his algebra homework, Zak had dashed off a sketch of a girl (Bean? Hard to say)
with a guitar (Okay, so maybe it was
Bean).
He showed Bean the sketch, and
flipped the page back over. Then, he was
scribbling numbers again, quickly enough that it surprised her. At the edge of her vision, the light over the
river brightened, and the water sparkled.
Bean looked up.
That’s when she saw the dinosaurs.
Brontosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus rex. What were the names of the others?
Was that a steg ... a stegosaurus, maybe?
She couldn’t remember.
The dinosaurs were huge, at least life-sized, and on a barge in the
river, being towed by a tugboat. The
playground of the elementary school next door to Stormkill High was filling
with children in double rows, walking toward the riverbank, led by their
teachers.
Bean remembered her third grade teacher’s
explanation: “The dinosaur models are for the Sinclair Oil Exhibit, at the
World’s Fair they’re building in The City.
The whole school’s going outside to watch the dinosaurs sail down the
River.”
Bean stared out the library window.
She remembered how she’d put on her itchy blue mohair sweater and lined
up with her class. She hadn’t wanted to
be Alice Turton’s partner, but she’d had to hold someone’s hand when they
walked outside the building together: the buddy rule. The hall had been echoing with the sound of
everyone in it all at once and then they were out on the playground.
Eleventh-grade Bean got up from the table, leaned her arms on the
windowsill, and looked down. Outside,
the elementary school classes walked toward the Hudson. And there:
there was a little girl toward the front of one line of children with a blue
sweater and long, red hair.
What Bean saw was herself, in the
past, and so she pushed the window up and leaned out. The dinosaur barge was
right in the middle of the mercury-colored river...
...And then it wasn’t. It had blinked out––gone. There was nothing, nothing but the glitter of
sun on water and the rough cliffs on the other side of the Hudson. The playground next door was empty, unless
you counted a couple of squirrels and a few canvas-seat swings, moving in the
wind. Bean pulled her head back
inside. Zak was at her side, looking
either concerned or amused. She couldn’t tell.
Mrs. Webber was on her way across the room.
“Heavens! You’ll freeze all of us, Rebecca! Next time, just tell me if you’re too warm!” Mrs. Webber said, as soon as she got
close enough so she didn’t have to raise her voice. Kids from the tables near Bean stared. There
was a little laughter, a buzz of whispered conversations. She managed to shrug
her shoulders, and heard Zak chuckle.
The pages of Bean’s open notebook were moving in the cold breeze, but
then Mrs. Webber closed the window and they were still. There was a bit more
laughter, then it was quiet again.
Author Bio:
Christine’s house contains two pipe organs (her husband is a choir director/organist), two spoiled tom cats, and too many books. She’s also a poet, and the author of two collections of verse, Zero Degrees at First Light, and Sheltering in Place. Christine taught English and Creative Writing for years in the Clarkstown Schools. She DJ’s free form rock and roll weekly on Area24radio.com, and plays guitar, dulcimer, and tower chimes.
Website: http://chrispygal.weebly.com/
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book page for Time Runs Away: * https://www.facebook.com/beanstravels?fref=ts
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Giveaway:
I have a 16 year that wants to read this. Thank you.
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