Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

time travel

A Stab at a Self-interview: Question 3 ~ a new series

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Do you have another series planned?

My husband and I have a time travel series planned. We will not be writing on it until the Standing Stone series is complete and the fifth book in the Students of Jump series is out.

It will be written for the New Adult market. Though I don’t want to get into the plotting aspects of the piece, we are thinking at this time it will involve four college students who find themselves pulled back in time after they rent a house together. At this time the location of their shift back in time will incorporate the Victorian or Elizabethan periods. Our research will determine the final decision.

In the mean time, Standing Stone book 3 is in process and Standing Stone book 2 will be ready for publication quite soon.

A Stab at Self-interview: Question 2 ~ the next Students of Jump book

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When is the next Students of Jump book coming out and what is it about?

Puff – manufactured pet extraordinaire.

I am planning to begin writing book 5 in the Students of Jump series in August. As soon as all three of the Standing Stone books are out, then I’ll shift back to SofJ. So I could start earlier.

If you’ve read book 4, That’s the Trouble with Time, then you’ve met Puff and his friend Sarra Marsh. Puff is such a great character, entertaining and protective, and so unassuming. Seriously, with a name like Puff who would imagine the little guy could go into attack mode if Sarra runs into trouble? One of my beta readers made the comment that every student of jump needs a Puff with them. That statement hung about at the back of my mind while I redrafted and edited book 4. I had to admit that having Puff there for Sarra had added to the excitement of the story. Puff certainly did help her out quite a bit when she ran into sticky situations.

A few hours of brainstorming rounded out a cast of five engineered critters that could accompany students of jump. So potentially, there could be several more books with Puff-like characters.

As a result of that brainstorm, Lizzie and Samantha joined the jump team. Unlike Sarra and Puff, Lizzie and Samantha don’t get along that well, and it takes some effort on both their parts to make the partnership work. And that is the easy part of Samantha’s jump into the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy, in 1703. I am hoping that At Any Given Time (tentative title of book 5) will be out by Dec. 2017 or Jan. 2018.

Been hanging out with the lady writers these days

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Ready to read at a moment’s notice

Just today I decided to make a list of my new favorite
authors and was surprised to find that they were all women. What’s up with
that?  All my past favorites have been
largely men, or in some cases women using male pen names. Same question
applies. I suppose I’ll have to think on that, but for now, I thought I would
just highlight these ladies of writing. To avoid any favoritism, I am following
the alphabetical rule.
Kim Headlee – she
writes a series of books that is steeped in Arthurian legend. Her
characterization is strong and ties nicely into the legend without being
strangled by it.  The female characters
are strong as are the male which is what I like to read as it really bothers me
when generally one gender is more capable, intelligent and sensible than the
other.  She is a skilled writer, and
especially so in this particular series. 
For more specific details on Headlee see my post of Learning from the Masters on Headlee.
L. A. Hilden – I
tumbled onto Hilden’s writing via Goodreads. It’s been a while so I can’t
really say if I read a book by her first or started chatting with her first.
But they were not far apart in either case. 
I have enjoyed her time travel regency romance series.  She is particular about her research down to
the tiniest details.  I am a sucker for
good research as I love the marriage between fiction and history.  It has been quite some time since I focused
largely on reading romance, so Hilden’s books are actually a step away from
my current interest, but not too big a step as I have lately run almost
exclusively to time travel in my reading and this particular series of hers
anchors itself in the main character’s stumble back and sometimes forward in
time. She’s working on another novel laced with time travel that I have been treated with a glimpse at.
Marcy Peska –
another author I have become close friends with. We met on Twitter via our dog
interests and blossomed into sharing our writing interests.  Peska has two books out that are urban
magic/legend stories imbedded in Alaskan landscapes. I am not much for urban legend,
but throw in some magic and I am ready to take the leap. Leap I did and I met a
strong woman character who is finding her way through unexpected elemental
magic, friendship and danger. The characters are genuine and full of spark,
particularly Vivian who shares the journey in quips and quarrels that show her
depth of character and struggle to deal with the unexpected magic she finds all
around her.  Remember, you promised a
bunch of people (not just me) a book 3, Marcy.
Veronica Roth – the
author of a dystopian series. At this point in time, she hardly needs me to
tell about what she has written. I enjoyed her books because I found her
created society a reasonable evolution and its ultimate breakdown also well
supported. Her characters are easy to connect to, in fact, easy to feel
possessive about.  I found I was arguing
with the play of events, but one cannot control the world he or she lives in,
so how can readers expect everything to flow as they wish. This did not stop me
from “Whatting!” at particular events, but I prefer my flabbergasted
rampage to a predictable read any day.
Jodi Taylor – Her
St. Mary’s time travel novels have quite hooked me.  I wait for the February publication of her
fifth book in the series. (I also read her Nothing
Girl standalone novel and loved it as well.) What I appreciate most about
this series is Max’s humor and internal dialogue. She is the main character
and tells the story with wit, flawed wisdom and loads of emotional baggage.
After reading four of the series books, I know that when there is a moment for
me to rest my tense expectations, something bad is about to happen and Max is
going to be stretched to the limit of her imaginative escape powers, and
emotional scars are going to tear, a marathon to the end.
Rysa Walker – The
Chronos Files series.  I have read the first two books of
the series and am waiting on the third. It is sort of a YA/NA time travel mix
or perhaps it is a YA evolving over time into an NA. In any case, I am
thoroughly enjoying the time travel “training” of Kate by fire and
confabulation. Poor girl. It’s not enough to have her losing lovers every time
the history takes a flip, but she has to stop her grandfather from thoroughly
destroying the world as she knows it (or keeps knowing it more than one way), while
deciding who to trust/distrust/retrust/untrust and work the darn hourglass
thingy that moves her through time.
April White – I
will tell you right now, I avoid vampire and werewolf books purely on
principal.  I have no explanation for
that other than if everybody is writing about vampires, I am probably going to
get annoyed. (Go ahead and shake your head, I keep reading time travel. I know,
I know. I didn’t say I was logical just avoiding a particular genre for some
reason.) The point in bringing this up is that White’s Immortal Descendants
series includes a vampire or two.  And
the main character is in love with a vampire. But that is not the focus of the
series. Time Travel is the focus as is getting back alive, figuring out how it
all works, protecting people important to her and avoiding all the interference
that comes her way when she is just trying to save her mother, and then her
lover, and then her friend, and his friend, and everybody else who gets pulled
in. I hope book three comes out soon.
The immortal Connie
Willis – I could blame her for getting me hooked on time travel if it
wasn’t for Heinlein who gets the blame for just about everything I do related
to reading or writing.  However, I had
been on hiatus awhile reading a lot of literary stuff (Jane Austin about killed
me) and then I read Blackout,
Bellweather, Doomsday Book, and….. 
You get the picture. She was just trolling along, and I took the bait
and been hooked ever since. Because I like time travel and nonstop up and down,
breath-stopping difficulties and general lost in time stuff!
So there you are. That is what I have been reading lately.
Yes, I have read other non-time travel books in between and several by men, but
these are the ladies I keep checking up on and packing my Kindle with. They are
the reason my files are now sorted by author rather than book title.
Who are you reading? 
Is there a common factor?  Are any
of these ladies on your list? If not, why not?
#reading
#timetravel
#writers

Time travel: returning to the best of times

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Revisit yesterday.

Never mind focusing on what terrible thing would come out of going back in time. Just what if I could? What things would I want to just observe. Imagine being able to cherish an event without worrying about all the other things that drag attention away because of worry or fear or weariness.  This is my list of “If I could go back.”

  • definitely hide where I could see my mother painting in the backyard
  • see the day my mom and dad where washing the car and he turned the hose on her and she doused him with  the sudsy water from the tin pail
  • the night my dad brought my mom home from a date and stood beneath her parents’ window tossing pebbles until her dad pulled up the sash and demanded to know what they were about.  It was midnight and he had asked her to marry him and she had said yes. Her father said, “About time,” pushed down the window and opened a bottle of champagne.
  • my dad coming off a destroyer in Boston Harbor mid WWII for shore leave
  • when my dad was a boy and he and his best friend stole apples from a neighbor’s orchard, got caught and had to work the season harvesting those apples
  • my sister and I when she told me my dolls were actually alive. How was she so convincing?
  • the day my dad took us to meet our grandparents who hadn’t seen us since we were babies. How did I know Grampy’s lap was the best place to take a nap?
  • the day I crawled under the porch to retrieve inner tubes, knowing that dark, web-draped place was infested with spiders, and I returned triumphant with tubes for my sister and myself to go float on the lake with.  She was older than I, but for that one day, I was heroic in her eyes.
  • watch my husband march in Ozzie’s Band when he was a clarinet-playing boy
  • the day we drove up to the house with our baby girl for her first day at home
  • my graduation ~ Oh heck, all three of them
  • watch me on skis for the first time tumbling my way down the mountain. Maybe this time I’ll laugh.
  • that first dinner date with my husband. I want to know if it was visible how much my legs were shaking
  • the first time my daughter walked all by herself was at the daycare center. I really wanted to see that.
  • see my grandmother on her stone stoop on that tiny island in Sweden: a young woman who couldn’t wait to come to America
  • my mom at one of her photo shoots
  • see my face when my dad told me we could just turn around and walk away, and we were in line behind the bridesmaids ready to enter the church where I was about to get married (I stayed ~ 34 years now. One of my best decisions)
  • my father flying search and rescue missions for a Maryland CAP unit
  • lazing around on the shores of Lake Powell or my husband’s outrageous skiing technique in the side channels while other campers whooped and yelled their praise
  • hear my daughter’s three-year-old version of umbrella just once more
  • the day I walked home from the university clinic with news I was pregnant and didn’t realize I was grinning ear to ear until I was halfway to the house
  • that crash landing my father walked away from that curled the tips of his plane’s propeller a good foot
  • my father-in-law dancing with my mother-in-law before he knew she would one day be his wife

What would you want to go back and see. Splurge, name three.

#timetravel
#favorite*memories
#what*if

SF genres: where do I fit in?

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mixing it up in SF genres

One of the really difficult things I have found about
writing SF is that there are so many subgenres. I have been doing research so I can be certain which one(s) I fall into.

After reviewing the various sites that explain SF subgenres, I sat down to list the qualities that exist in my Students of Jump series: 

  • time travel 
  • crisis of character 
  • interpersonal relationships 
  • alternate history 
  • family dynasty 
  • Retro Futurism: I write in a style I remember from my days of
    reading science fiction as a preteen and teenager, and apparently they have a
    name for that. 
  • strong female characters 
  • light romance 
  • genetic engineering
  • artificial intelligence 
  • soft science

I found a pretty good list at SciFi Lists.  The explanations were brief but adequate enough to help me decide if my work fit in the category.  
My intention for looking into the subgenres was to make sure I was tagging mine correctly. 
After all, I don’t want to have people searching for novels in the style
I write and have mine slipping by them because I have used tags that don’t
describe my work well.
I found three that seemed to cover my series: time travel,
alternate history and artificial intelligence under the umbrella of Retro
Futurism.  Three of these tags I need to add to my books.
Now I am not certain I fit under Retro Futurism, but I do
know I was heavily influenced by the writers that it is named for: Heinlein,
Asimov, Bradbury, Anderson, Savage, the list goes on. I’ve read plenty of Crichton,
Pohl, Niven, Pournelle, and Norton, but I don’t feel they influenced me as
much.

How did you decide what genre best described you?  Did you look at what authors influenced you, what you read, make a list like I did or some other means to select what best covered your work?

#genre
#SF
#Heinlein

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

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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