Talking with the Time Travel Trio: Part Three

Tell me about your characters.

 

DENNIS: Katya Sevnik is my main character from Katya and Cyrus Time Pilgrims, Almost Yesterday and my latest, (not yet released) Tomorrow’s Borrowed Trouble. Katya is a strong, independent young woman plagued with a condition known as temporal amnesia. She has no clue what year she is from and is trying desperately, to locate her family. Because of Katya’s time displacement and amnesia, she has not matured beyond the age of twenty, although it is revealed that she has lived for over ninety years. Her life experiences include dancing the Charleston as a 1920s flapper girl and experiencing the rock-and-roll era of the 1960s. She becomes a sponge in every time period she visits, soaking up the culture and instantly becoming one with the period. Katya and fellow Time Pilgrim Cyrus are lovers. Before Katya came into his life, Cyrus (the bosses' son) was all business. Katya enjoys showing him that time can sometimes be traveled just for the sheer fun of it.

 

Another fan favorite character is Hickory Dickory Doc (Doc), the most powerful canine Time Pilgrim of them all.

 

LAURA: I love the sound of your characters! Like Andrew and Drew in Time for Andrew, Shawn and Niall are identical, if cross-century, twins. There, however, the resemblance ends. Shawn and Niall have both had trauma and loss in their lives. Both, for instance, have lost their fathers to violence. However, they've reacted very differently to it. Shawn, living in modern America, drove himself. He worked hard and played harder. He became a gambler, a drinker, a lady's man, liar, and cheater. He has more confidence than ten men combined. He's generous, showering his girlfriend's young cousins with gifts, and throwing fantastic barbecues and parties on his twenty acres. He loves his mother, buys her a house, and gives her the Great Dane she loves. He lifts an orchestra to great heights with his drive, marketing, personality, and sheer will. He lives by the motto Life is about having fun! 

         

Niall Campbell, by contrast, is a Highland warrior, raised in the tough world of Scotland's wars of independence, in a time and place where you may get whipped for kissing the Laird's daughter, where faith surrounds his life as powerfully as the walls of Glenmirril Castle, where if you want to eat, you may have to face the MacDougalls, who have once again stolen your cattle, where if you want those you love to live, you may have to stand between them and Longshanks' charging warhorses.

 

Surrounding Niall and Shawn are Allene, Niall's betrothed and later wife; Amy, Shawn's pregnant girlfriend who sees the good in Shawn, who believes he's more than the party-boy public persona he shows, until she finally has to face his bad side; Angus, the inspector assigned to Shawn's 'missing persons' case who falls in love with Amy; Christina, who helps Shawn and Niall in a daring rescue at great risk to herself and becomes part of life at Glenmirril; the Laird who rules Glenmirril and hides away in a secret dungeon to do the woodwork he finds soothing, but which is unseemly for a laird, and his giant of a brother, Hugh, and Brother David and the boy without a name, Red, whom Shawn and Niall find in Roman ruins that are ancient even by Niall's time.

 

DENNIS: Laura, I love the idea of cross century twins. I have twins in the Time Pilgrim stories as well. Cyrus and Cathy Callahan are very close twins but the twist is, Cathy decides to stay in 1906 when she falls in love with a man that helped her in the San Francisco earthquake. When he finally comes back to the present, it’s seventeen years later. Now Cyrus’s baby sister is old enough to be his mother.

 

LAURA: How strange to see your twin sister so much older than yourself!  Niall and Shawn have a discussion about Niall being his elder, which exasperates Allene, as they're the same age.  Although, of course, Niall is technically 700 years older than Shawn.

 

ANGELA: In my first time travel/romance, All Bottled Up, the heroine is jilted by her fiancée the day before her wedding.  She actually wishes for the perfect man, and poof out comes a sexy highlander in a kilt. 

 

LAURA: Yep, that sounds about right!

 

ANGELA: In my first full-length time travel/romance, Once Upon A Highlander my hero, Alec MacLean is tossed into the 21st century at the behest of his eccentric grandmother to retrieve a missing deed, and appears just as the heroine, Caroline Hughes is attacked by thugs.  The pair is brought back to 17th century Scotland just in time to stop the Earl of Argyll and England’s king from taking his lands. 

 

DENNIS: I own All Bottled Up on my Kindle. The genie is a hoot. I will have to check out your full length novel.

 

What era do they go to?

 

DENNIS: Too many to list them all, but here is a sampling:

Chicago Fire 1871

Kennedy assassination 1963

1980s party

Great San Francisco Earthquake 1906

Gold Rush 1849

Summer of Love 1967

World Trade Center 2001

Titanic 1912

2001 theme party

Chicago World’s Fairs 1933, 1893, 2033

Many more in the upcoming book, including the American Civil and Revolutionary wars, Native American village, 62 B.C., The great Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, 1935, the horrific tornado in Moore, Oklahoma from way back in 2013…

 

LAURA: Very exciting! Lots of times to research! Maybe your characters will bump into Lisa Mason's characters in the Summer of Love! The Blue Bells Chronicles covers both the present time, and Scotland in the time from June 1314 up to May of 1318. The medieval half of the story is set against the backdrop of the Wars of Independence, in which Scotland fought for years against England's attempt to take over their country.

 

DENNIS: I was very surprised when I learned of Lisa’s book, Summer of Love. I had already written my segment. When I spoke to her, she thought it was cool that we had the same interest. 1314 to 1318 was of great historical importance in Scotland.

 

ANGELA: Personally, I’m a medieval girl. However, I love my highlanders in kilts….so I have no choice to go beyond the 16th century in order to be historically correct!

 

DENNIS: Ah yes, the kilts. Being a man, I always wondered what appeals to woman so much about them.

 

READERS: Why do women like kilts so much?

 

 

 

 

 

For More on the Authors: See Parts One and Two of our Time Travel Conversation.

 

Coming next: Part Four