Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

In Times Passed

You can’t wear a bowler hat in 1861, just in case you were wondering

by

I write time travel novels, and one of the features that stands out when a character travels in time is fitting in with the culture.  That includes clothing, behavior, hair styles, social interaction and such.  Since my characters move about in time, I have had to research to make sure that Mick is wearing the right kind of hat (top hat, not bowler, by the way) when he takes a stroll in Boston 1861 or Emily’s hairdo is appropriate for 1634 in Stepney, England.

That is part of taking on a time travel novel; it is just the nature of the beast.  But I love history, so any reason is a good excuse to immerse myself in the past.  It is time consuming and it is inspiring.  The simple endeavor of describing the sound of horses pulling a carriage down the street led me to learn what kind of paving stone was used on early Boston roads.

I wanted to know if Boston had dirt or cobble roads in 1861.  It is a simple question, but the answer carries a significant difference.  The thud of hoof on dirt is quite different from the sharp plod of a shod step on stone.  But I learned even the diction mattered.   There is a big difference between a sett and a cob, and which was used on the street effected horses and carriage wheels, too.  A sett is a flat granite stone laid in rows which were kinder to horses and did not wear out carriage wheels too quickly, while cobs, round stones that were not just awkward to walk on but dangerous due to their slipperiness, produced an annoying rocking motion.  And that effort to be accurate is meant to add authenticity to my novels.

Though my books are part of a series, they are not focused on one character but on a family of characters who are close in friendship or in family connections.  Brent Garrett is the main character in the first book (In Times Passed).  His daughter Misty picks up the time traveling bug in the second book (No-Time like the Present), and Mick and Emily, Brent’s brother- and sister-in-law and Misty’s foster parents, take up the baton in the third book.

The third book is where I had the most fun working with “costuming” because Mick and Emily are searching for Renwick, who has gone missing during a jump, and they are following clues as Misty finds them and forwards them on.   Since it’s a bit of a mystery where he could have landed, and they have all of time to search, there are bound to be coincidental matches as well as reliable clues, but they are tough to tell apart.

So this detecting, time travel couple find themselves going to places unfamiliar.  Now I can’t do research on times that have not come yet, but I can create such a place and time.  Still it must be unique and grow logically from what human beings do with fashion and interaction.  This excerpt is from the costuming room that Mick and Emily use to prep for their jumps.  In this excerpt, they are getting ready to go to Poukeepsie, New York, in 2082.

     “It’s probably best we get dressed, Mick.  I think these outfits are designed to go
together.  What do you think?” 

     Mick pulled his gaze from the empty doorway and looked at
the clothes hanging on the closet extension. 
He raised an eyebrow.  “I was
hoping that one was yours, but I see now it must be mine.”

     “They’re not bad, Mick.”  The two stood examining the outfits. 

     “I’ve never worn orange before,” Mick said.  “Always thought it was illegal for a
redhead to wear orange.”

     “The brown coat and the tan pants probably keep it from
overpowering the look.”  Emily stood
before the set provided for her.  On the
shoe carousel, she saw a pair of tall black boots her size beside a set of
brown ankle high stouts she knew were for Mick. 
He stood to her right staring at the lower portion of the pants he would
be donning.  “We’ll figure those out
when we get to them, Mick.  Start high
and work down.  Ready?”  She started by taking off jewelry and
emptying her pockets onto a tray.

     Mick nodded and removed his suit jacket, tossing it to the
closet for return to the proper slot.  He
continued to remove clothes until he could put on the first layer hanging
before him.  It was a bright orange tunic
with a V-neck collar over an under sheath of butter white.  The tunic tapered in, starting at the chest
without being snug and stopped at the hip. 
The long sleeves had butter white frills at the wrist.  Mick looked to Emily for comment, but she was
busy pulling her pink tunic on sans trim and deep V-neck.  Another difference was that it stopped at just
below her waist.  The material, a soft
suede, was the same though.

     “If I put the coat on next, I’ll feel like a flasher in
a park,” said Mick.  “I am
going for the pants, but I am going to ignore those orange attachments at the
ankle for now.”

Emily nodded reaching for the knickers before her.

     After pulling the deep-waisted pants on, Mick shrugged into
the calf-length overcoat in heavy brown suede. 
“Must be going to Poughkeepsie in the early spring or late
fall.  This is a warm outfit.”

     “I think so, too. 
These pants look like they stole the pattern from Louie the
fourteenth.”

     “Is that better or worse than genie windpants?”
grumbled Mick.  Emily turned to look and
laughed out loud.

     “I’m going to be armed and dangerous, little lady, so
can the laughter.”  Then Mick looked
at her and choked and snorted.  “I
feel much better now.  No one is going to
shoot at us. You can’t kill a man with a grin spread across your face.  What’s that little black thing?”

     “It’s a skull cap, and stop laughing at me.”

     “I don’t have one. 
I don’t have a hat at all.”

     “Are you complaining?”

     “Don’t get me started, woman.   I can complain about a lot more than not
having a skull cap.”
I love those two characters.
Book 3 publishes in July 2014
These two links provide access to the first two Students of Jump novels, my anthology of short stories and my non-fiction narrative frameworks text.  And I am off to research some more.

 My Amazon author page

Smashwords Author page

Family builds my characters and my stories

by

Branch of the family tree, okay vine.

Often when I read science fiction, the main characters and certainly the supporting and stock characters rarely have family.  I don’t mean they don’t ever have family, but family is not the cause of change or action in them.  Family is window decoration in most novels.  Yet family is a basic component of my fiction writing.

Family can drive my characters to do things they have been avoiding or things they would not have done without the influence of a member of the family.  In my first book In Times Passed, Brent Garrett jumps to another time period claiming the excuse that he had to get away from his mother’s interference.  After he makes a life in the new time period, it is family again that affects him, influences his actions.  Loss of family nearly destroys him.

In No-Time like the Present, family motivated Misty Meredith to trust a stranger and jump two hundred years into her future so she could stand before her father and prove to him he failed by leaving her, that she didn’t need him anyway because she had her Uncle Mick and Aunt Emily, family that cared to raise her.  And she is surrounded by family, starts her own family and ultimately learns that family means no one ever really leaves anyone behind.

Mick and Emily never had children of their own, yet they raised a family.  They keep taking in the orphans, granted they are family, but this act of parenting the parentless is a basic feature of their lives.   So in Next Time We Meet, this couple think they have nothing to give the future, but what they are always offering is future to those who need it most.  All their efforts are directed at creating, supporting and reuniting family. 

I am currently working on the fourth book in the Students of Jump series, working title Testing Time, and family is again basic to the story.  Sarra Marsh’s family must break up in order to survive what is happening in the world and time she lives in.  The group she ends up with is guided by two individuals, Ma Potterby (a mother to all the assembled renegades) and Carnegie, (a sort of patriarchal figure whose terse manner ensures discipline in the ranks).  As she endeavors to enact change in her society as dictated by her father from a distance, she is always aware of her disbursed family.  Until change occurs, they must remain separated.  And the change may be far too late to bring them back together.

I have an anthology of short stories.  Not one of them lacks the basic feature of family.  The title story, “Gardens in the Cracks,” is steeped in the fact that major change was made in how families are established, maintained, organized and torn apart.  Marga Graber has already given up one child to the demands of planetary survival and is now facing more tears in her family fabric no less damaging.  The novella sequel that follows it in the anthology deals with the events that should pull family together but often does the opposite.  Still the pull that drives us from within to desire and seek family lives on and is at times the only thing that keeps these characters going.  Thus, in Scrapper, a boy finds his way home greatly changed from the boy who was excited to leave family.

Family is integral to us all.  I cannot separate it from my writing.  I am forever influenced by a woman I don’t even remember because she was at one very brief time my mother.  My father now deceased more than eight years is daily a part of my life.  For a time he held a dual role in a time period when few men could imagine being a mother to two children: one a toddler, the other an infant.  He potty trained me, and when I was becoming concerned about my daughter reaching that milestone in development, who did I call?  Yup, my dad, who offered his usual sage advice.  Potty trained in less than a week and my little girl made the decision.  I just offered opportunity and a willingness to listen. But that’s a story for another time.  Family, gotta love them.

Author pages where my eBooks are listed and available for sample or purchase.
Smashwords
Amazon

Blog Hop!

by

Hitting the keys

QUESTIONS FOR DECEMBER TWITTER BLOG HOP: I was tagged by E. M. Wynter!
What are you writing?
I am writing my third novel in a time travel series called Students of Jump.  The first book In Times Passed chronicled the activities of Brent Garrett as he learned not just how to travel in time but how to manage his own life on terms he can accept and even find joy in.  He comes from a time in the not-so-distant future and a society that is separate from most of earth’s population.  He has lived under the daunting expectation that he is going to invent something or somehow bring about amazing change in his society.  Jumping into the past was his way of escaping this expectation, but he learns life always carries expectations hard to live up to. The second book No-time Like the Present follows his daughter Misty Meredith who feels Brent Garrett owes her some explanations.  Misty has her own conflicts to resolve and finds jumping through time opens opportunities but cannot by itself fix anything.  But the work I am writing now, Next Time We Meet, involves two characters, Mick and Emily Jenkins, and their search for a sense of belonging in a time ahead of their own. That is the simple premise: it’s the rest that makes it complicated working with these two.


How does this differ from your last work?
I thought the other two novels were difficult because they had two timelines to deal with and a variety of conflicts between characters.  But this book included two demanding additions: one is the fully-developed relationship of Mick and Emily. They are a couple who have lived into their senior years gaining experience, a definite opinion about life and family, and a tight relationship.  The experience they bring feels nearly useless to them as it all occurred in another time, their family connections suffered gaps due to the jumps in time taken by the various members, and their opinions don’t always apply to current conditions.  Their relationship is the only safety line they have.  Mick appears to be the dominant character, but he has functioned for so long with Emily in his life, there is little he does that is not influenced by their relationship, and that brings its own conflicts.  Emily is the hand that carries Mick’s world, and he is the force that keeps them moving forward.  But I love writing about relationships so this has been a challenge but not a difficult one.  The addition of what Mick decides is their best means of becoming part of the family life in the twenty-third century is what creates all the struggle for me as a writer.


It turns out I am writing a science fiction, time travel, mystery novel.  Why didn’t I see that coming?  Mick, with Emily’s agreement, has chosen to spend their time figuring out what caused the unexplained disappearance of Renwick Cray during a simple hop home from Old Garrett Complex.  This occupation is meant to help them become part of the society they have joined.  Emily christens them time-hop detectives, and the two travel about in time following clues as they search for Renwick.  Facing fears and realizing it isn’t as easy as just showing up in a new time is a challenge to the characters, but for me it means a lot of research into the events and locations they are searching as well as keeping their actions logical and progressive as they gain understanding of what actually happened to Renwick.  Hints I left in book 2 effect the decisions and actions, whether sensible or illogical, that occur in book 3. Technology’s limits and advances affect the action as well, and Mick and Emily are learning how to work these new technologies that in many cases are new to everyone in the extended family that makes up the Students of Jump.  That is the main difference, making sure all the clues ultimately lineup without seeming obvious, yet I want the reader to look back and see how the confusion was natural while the final result was also logical.


Why do you write?
To see what is going to happen next, of course.   I don’t think there is an actual reason behind why I write, not one that is a conscious decision, anyway.  I mean, I didn’t decide to breath, but I do breath every day, rhythmically and regularly.  I do decide to eat, but if I don’t, my body won’t last long.  For me writing is a combination of those two normal human conditions.  I write because that is what my mind does with the thoughts that pass through it, and if I didn’t write, something very destructive would happen to my mind; something would most definitely die.  I write because I must, because I feel great when I do it, and I really need to know what is going to happen next.


What is your writing process? 
That is a bit tricky to answer.  I came up with the idea of the first book when I worked as an assembly line worker many, many years ago.  I was listening to the song by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, “I Just Dropped In” and started thinking.  Following the storyline as it played out in my mind kept me from going nutty in the brain-stupefying atmosphere of repetitive work.  I must have written that book in my head at least three times before I finally wrote it down.  The second book just followed the first, like a seedling dropped from the parent into nourishing ground.  Now this third book, I used several programs to assist in developing, though I wrote the first draft of it shortly after finishing the rough draft of book 2.  I used the brainstorming program Freemind to organize the various conflicts, Microsoft OneNote to organize my research and more recently the online program Padlet (see post on selecting timeline program) to keep track of the timeline as Mick and Em jump through time looking for Renwick or his kidnapper.  And all of this ends up in yWriter5 after being drafted in Microsoft Word.


When I get stuck, I lie down and think about where the characters are currently and what they are dealing with.  I don’t get to lay there long, five to fifteen minutes later, I have to get up and write what must be gotten down.  I wake up in the night or find I can’t get to sleep when the two of them are struggling with the facts about Renwick’s disappearance not fitting together, and sometimes I realize I missed an important hint left in a previous book.  Sometimes I work the hint in as a bit of information Mick and Em overlooked, and sometimes I redraft the scene to work more logically with actual events.  I use outlines, hand-written notes, recorded voice memos, and other means of keeping track of my ideas and plans for a written piece.  I avoid telling anyone my ideas so my writing doesn’t lose momentum.  I get feedback after a strong draft is written.  I am inconsistent when it comes to process, but demanding about outcome.  I don’t care how my characters get there, just that they get there.


My books at Amazon.com
My books at Smashwords.com
Twitter handle:  @LDarbyGibbs
Facebook page

Characterization, Star Trek and life challenges

by

Star Trek, Next Generation is one of my favorite shows, and my husband and I have been watching an episode every night while we eat dinner as we work our way through the seasons the show aired.  The early ones were still working on depth, characterization and purpose, but after the third year, the show got its legs under it.  I can view the same episode again and again and enjoy the interactions of characters that are distinctly different, driven by motivations individual and evolving.  What captures my attention most are the shows which focus on particular characters and their growth facing distressing or challenging situations.

Tonight we are watching the episode which has Captain Picard trying to understand why he left the ship.  As a second Picard arrives in a shuttle craft that is from six hours in the future, the original Picard wonders what would cause him to choose leaving the Enterprise when the result was the total destruction of the ship.  He is angry at the second Picard for leaving and surviving.  It causes him to question his integrity as a captain and his responsibility to his crew.

In the life of any individual, events take place which force one to evaluate, re-evaluate and respond to situations.  We question our choices based on our desires and attempt to see ourselves as truly as we can.  How we answer ourselves, how we evaluate our choices forces us to grow as people.  Characters we create must grow as well, question their choices based on their understanding of the reasons which caused them to select those choices.

This is the challenge I love to work on when I write.  It is also what causes me the most doubt.  It generates questions that I must answer if I want to understand what sort of growth is potentially possible in my characters.  Looking at characterization forces me to stay aware of the process of growth in my characters.

In the first book of my series, the main character Brent Garrett from the start was driven by his perception of his mother’s expectations.  A part of me was always uncomfortable with this fact about him.  Why so driven by his mother’s attempts to control and inspire his life choices?  He’s a grown adult and should be past any dependency on what his mother wishes him to accomplish.  But that is only one part of his story just as our own lives are replete with challenges.  We don’t get them one at a a time.  He doesn’t either.  Still I had to examine my discomfort with his difficulties in order to understand his.

So when I look at my own life and consider the things that have driven my actions, I must confess that the loss of my mother when I was an infant played a strong factor in my wanting to emulate her.  And it had an even stronger influence on my efforts to make sure my father was proud of me.  At one point in my teenage life, I became aware that he gained me shortly before he lost his wife, my mother.  I did not stand a chance of replacing her.  I could only hope he would find my efforts to be the best I could adequate.

When I reached adulthood, I found that every time I visited my father, he attempted to place me back in a childhood role.  It wasn’t until I had been married several years, spent numerous phone calls learning about his experience watching my mother die over a six month period while playing both father and mother to two small children that we grew beyond the loss together.  I hadn’t seen him in four years, though we had talked on the phone regularly.  When I came to visit, it was to find he had suffered a heart attack while I was traveling the 1200 miles to get to my parents’ home (he had remarried).  He was in the hospital and his perspective had gone through a tremendous change. 

The challenges I had gone through entering and growing in adulthood and his own brush with death had caused us both to change, to make new choices and to see ourselves and others in new ways.  So Brent had a perception of himself governed by his mother’s expectations and desires for his “success.”  Through book 1 and book 2 of my series Students of Jump, Brent reached adulthood and whether his mother was ready for him to grow beyond her wishes or not, he did.  Picard worked to understand the choices the second Picard made, and my father and I climbed over the wall that had divided us, interfering with our view of ourselves and our understanding of each other.

Yeah, that is what I like about writing — seeing characters evolve as questions are generated and answered.  And evolving myself along the way.

Technology must be logical and progressive in a sci-fi novel

by

Nerg Box

As a writer of science fiction now working on my third book in the series, I have been practicing to maintain a consistency in my technology.  The last thing I wanted to do was bring up a handy dandy techno tool that is used once and never seen again.  In producing a society or group that has depth and character, it is important that there be logic in the ideas and connectiveness in their use.  So my unique technology must develop and grow with my characters and their experiences.

Here are some examples of what I mean.

Nerg Box turned Time Travel box
In Book 1 In Times Passed, Brent stumbles upon a means to travel in time.  He alters a standard issue Nerg Box which results in a machine that can jump a person back in time.  This is all very well, but to have staying power, this device needs to evolve, develop in use, performance and even appearance.  It starts out as a rather non-descript gray box (Nerg [eN ER Gy]) which provides a temporary means to increase stamina and attention span and is nonnarcotic.  With some modifications in frequency and duration of the “effect,” Brent finds he has created a means to travel in time.

But Brent and his friends are tinkerers, and they have access to a computer with extensive abilities to improve this early model.  And Brent is not one to have a means to travel in time and leave it sitting in a closet.

Time Travel box turned Jump Stage
With Ismar’s help, Brent, Jove and Quixote build a stage that has the same “effect” and can be used to concentrate the time jumping abilities to more than one individual or thing.  This stage makes its debut in In Times Passed, and shows up again in No-Time Like the Present (Book 2) where it evolves over the course of the novel.

Jump Stage turned Jump Pack
In the third book, currently in redraft, Next Time We Meet, Mick and Emily find they can go anywhere or when for a second honeymoon by use of the individual, portable Jump Pack.  It has somewhat limited capabilities in that the jump calculations must occur in the lab still, but once downloaded to the pack, those calculations are available no matter where the jumper is.  This is important as they are on a honeymoon which is serving double duty.  Mick has determined he is going to be a detective, with his wife Emily’s assistance, of course.  Every man, even one who can travel in time, cannot manage without a good woman by his side or ahead of him.

Jump Pack evolves some more
Book 4, with the working title of Testing Time, is in draft and makes extensive use of a more advanced model of  the Jump Pack as it is able to calculate new jumps without returning to the lab.  When things aren’t going according to plan, such an improved model has tremendous advantage even if all it can offer is moving to another site to provide a few more seconds to make a dash for safety.

Another example:

Schemslide
This item shows up for the first time in Book 2.  It is a device that offers environmental as well as background information to its possessor.  It is referred to and used once, but the question of its further use is asked and answered.  It is appears again but as an embedded tool, one casually in use.

Schemslide turned essential time travel resource
In Book 3, Mick and Emily cannot manage without it.  Now called the noter, it provides historical information, a filing system for notes, is the transfer unit for calculated jumps, records environmental features, and is a time-delayed communications device.  Emily gets quite proficient at accessing its valuable capabilities as the travelers stretch their ability to understand the intricacies of moving about in time while tracking down a possible kidnap victim.

Readers complain about those “in the nick of time” devices or theories that save the day.  I don’t want that kind of situation in my books cropping up.  What fiction devices, good or bad, have caught your attention?

Book 1, In Times Passed at Smashwords and Amazon
Book 2, No-Time like the Present at Smashwords and Amazon