Out of Time – a peek into the future
World
building. Love it or hate it, as an author, creating a fictional playground for
our characters is a necessary evil. When I started work on the structure of my
time travel series, I needed to build in some rules, and to figure out how
stuff worked. Technical, huh? More than that, I needed to understand why
my characters would behave as they did.
Imagine a
society five hundred years in the future. World War III has shaped society into
something we wouldn’t recognise now. The world is stable, wars are a thing of
the past, and technology has continued to evolve. There’s a trade-off though.
People have learned to quash their emotions. Love is a thing of the past.
Without love or hate, or any of the strong emotions, society is more stable,
right?
With that
premise, my characters head back into the past, to 1941, on a data-gathering
exercise. When Isabella experiences love for the first time, it hits hard. She
has no frame of reference for falling in love, and feels adrift on a tide of
unfamiliar emotions.
Excerpt from Isabella’s Airman
As
before, we perched on hard chairs and tried not to stare at the stern man
sitting opposite us. He scratched out more notes in his little book and then
fixed his icy gaze on me. “Student Gillman. At our last session, I asked you to
expand your social analysis. What have you learned?”
How to
fall in love? How to die on the inside?
Next to me, Juliet cleared her
throat. “May I go first, sir?”
“I want to hear from Student
Gillman.”
Despite spending the entire
previous day in bed, I was tired beyond belief. I’d not slept properly since we
arrived here, and I was exhausted. Weariness pressed down on me, sapping my
strength and dissolving my common sense. I licked dry lips, swallowed, and
tried to find something to say.
Juliet fidgeted in her seat. The
clock ticked. I stayed silent.
“Student Gillman. I am waiting.”
I was waiting too. I wanted this
to be over.
“I can’t do this.” My voice
quavered, but I dug deep. “It’s wrong. We’re sitting here watching while they
are dying. A few hundred miles away on the other side of the English Channel,
soldiers are fighting and falling. The men here are risking their lives every
few days, while we observe. How is that right?”
The sentinel’s eyebrows rose. Beside
me, Juliet made a shocked noise, but I wasn’t stopping now. “In the news today,
I read about the raid on London. The worst since the war began. And it’s more
than I can cope with, to be immersed like this.” I swung around to face my
friend. Her face was white, her eyes red-rimmed like mine. “I wish I’d never
listened to you. I wish I’d never come here.”
If I’d stayed at home, I would
have never met Davy, but I would still be intact, not the broken shell I was
now. How did my heart continue to beat, to pump blood through my arteries?
Why did Davy have to die?
Giveaway:
How do you
think society will change in the next 500 years? One lucky commenter will win
an ecopy of Lila’s Wolf (Out of Time #1), and a swag bundle.
Isabella’s
Airman (Out of Time #2)
Time travel
student Isabella Gillman is about to embark on her most challenging
assignment--leaping back to 1941 to observe World War II. The rules are simple:
don’t get emotionally involved, and don’t interfere.
She breaks the
first rule when she falls in love with rear-gunner Davy Porteous. The second is
on its way out as well, when she realizes history says he won’t survive the
war. Torn between the fundamental laws of her society, and the man she loves,
Isabella faces a harsh reality: does she risk both their lives for a future
that may not happen?
She can’t predict
the results if she corrupts the timelines, but without her actions, Davy is out
of time.
Trailer link:
Book
links:
Author
links:
Author
bio:
Romance author Sofia Grey spends her days
managing projects in the corporate world and her nights hanging out with wolf
shifters and alpha males. She devours pretty much anything in the fiction line,
but she prefers her romances to be hot, and her heroes to have hidden depths.
When writing, she enjoys peeling back the layers to expose her characters’
flaws and always makes them work hard for their happy endings.
Music is
interwoven so tightly into my writing that I can’t untangle the two. Either I’m
listening to a playlist on my iPod, have music seeping from my laptop speakers,
or there’s a song playing in my head – sometimes on auto-repeat.
Thank you for hosting me today :-)
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