"The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things..."

TIME TRAVEL!

I always thought my first real spark of love for time travel happened when I was eleven. I remember walking out of the movie theater with my parents, a huge grin on my face, babbling nonstop about all the possibilities, and how it wasn’t completely out of the question that someone could someday really build a flux capacitor. (The whole teenage-crush-on-Michael-J.-Fox thing came a year or two later.)

Recently, however, I came across some old school papers and book reports my mom kept around. Apparently the time travel thing was a bit older than that, harkening back to elementary school and my childhood obsession with space and astronomy. I even illustrated my own “rainbow ring” for a book report on Tunnel Through Time by Lester Del Rey.

It’s such a huge topic and plot device. And really, what’s not to love? Well, other than the brain cramps and geeky arguments. Fortunately, there seems to be less of that in Romance - we’re too busy enjoying the results of time travel to fight over methods.

Even still, the fact that it hasn’t yet been accomplished in reality means that there are so many different ways we can accomplish it in fiction.

You’ve got your sci-fi time travel, and its variations - time machines built here on earth; space travel and wormholes and subsequent time travel there; mystery-time-travel, where someone from the future has the means and comes back to our present-time for whatever reason.

Then there’s the ‘magical’ time-travel - whether it’s accidental, a fluke of some kind of spelled-object; a Somewhere In Time kind of metaphysical trick; or completely fantastical and paranormal, where characters manage to willfully create the means to travel in time.

And those are just the means of time-travel. In fiction, what the characters and plot do with said time-travel is wonderfully and endlessly varied. Boil that down to romance-fiction, and you still get a delicious selection of methods. I’m not sure I can decide which romantic time-travel trope I love best:

-Modern character is thrust into a historical era and must function there. Inevitably, the lead character (okay, usually heroine), falls in love with someone in that era, and they must decide to sacrifice their entire world and choose to live out of their proper time for this new love.

This is often a nice, convenient way to write a historical romance without it being a typical historical romance. We can enjoy keeping one foot in each time, so to speak, and it feels like we’re ‘with’ the lead character, or they’re with us, in our wonderment of the world they’re experiencing.

Occasionally I’ve found stories where the heroine ultimately does return to present-time (usually unwillingly), only to discover her hero has materialized there in some form or another, say, via reincarnation or divine intervention. I absolutely love that idea, but I’m a sucker for that sort of thing!

-Character from historical era is thrust into present. Similar to above, but I don’t see it as frequently. Also, more room for hijinks with, say, a Viking wandering around Manhattan. Often, these feel less like the focus is on the time travel, and more like the focus is on the ‘modern’ woman falling for a crude, beast of a guy. Again, not so different from the previous example, but there is the advantage of the hero being taken down a notch because he has to be guided by the heroine through unfamiliar waters.

-There’s the more sci-fi form, with a character from the distant future coming to the present for whatever reason. I haven’t personally come across this in any romance novels, but have seen it in a few short stories that I liked.

-Just as rarely, but most appealing to me, is the notion of shorter-term time-travel. Maybe this goes back to the whole Back To The Future thing, but I like the concept of characters traveling and falling in love within a bare couple of generations of each other at most. Even better, I love the idea of actual consequences playing out, IE, the traveling character eventually returns and faces the older version of the man/woman they fell in love with in the past.

Obviously, this isn’t a comprehensive list, and I’m no expert on the topic. Just a fan and a writer! So, what are your favorite time travel tropes?

I Was Never Cool In School...

At the risk of bending some very wise rules about blogging (as explained by the great Kristen Lamb), I figured I'd go ahead and properly start things with an introduction and explanation of just what the hell I'm doing here. See, I have years (eep - more like a decade!) of experience with online journaling, spewing 'random musings' and pointless, narcissistic crap every day, several times a day, with little regard for what readers might have wanted.

Blogging is a different animal, apparently. And I'm a different person from those days. And, even though this is my blog, it's not really about me. It's about you and me - our common grounds, hanging out on those common grounds, shooting the shit about what interests us, all while drinking excellent coffee, consuming excellent chocolate, and admiring excellent eye- and ear-candy.

Therefore, I proclaim Mondays to be Common Grounds day. I'm an erotic-romance and paranormal-romance author. I would hope that if you've found your way here, it's because you and I have a common interest in the things that point to those types of reads. Things like magic, shifters, mythical creatures, afterlife, etc. But also things like yummy men and women, badass heroines and heroes, intelligent smut, and a proper touch of BDSM.

All the same, sometimes I'm going to want to get some things off my chest. I'm a writer, after all. Which means not only do I have Thoughts and Feels about the writing process, but the formatting process, the editing process, and the social process. Being a writer, whether self-published, or traditional, or somewhere in between, involves so much more than words on the screen. So, indulgent as it might be, I proclaim Wednesdays to be Writerly Wednesdays.

Fridays, well - it might not be the most original concept in the world, especially for a Friday, but damnit, it's fun - Friday Mash-ups. Random links I've found throughout the week that you should check out.

All that said, the title for this post does have a point:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d-mLKlEuQY&w=420&h=315]

It's Here!

My short story, Deluxe Package is finally finished, formatted, covered, and available for purchase at just about all of your usual ebook outlets! You can find it now on SmashWords and Amazon, All Romance eBooks, and B&N. And, of course, once it's been manually approved with SmashWords, it will be available through a number of other sites, as well! I'm a firm believer in widespread distribution, so my books will always be available in as many different formats as possible.

*Whew*! Can I just take a moment and say that self-publishing isn't easy?

Since I'm a pretty new face around these parts, I'd also like to say something upfront: I don't care how a book gets published. I have too many other things to focus on to get all soapboxy about the whole "self-publishing vs. traditional" debate. I think both have their value, and I think it's foolish to harbor blanket opinions (and make blanket statements!) about one or the other. So, yeah. There.

Me, I'll be self-publishing a few things, and shopping other things to smaller e-publishers, and maybe shopping even bigger things to agents. Next in my queue is a lovely little BDSM erotic romance novella called Switch. Keep your eyes peeled!

Let's Get This Party Started

Believe it or not, I write stuff. Which is why I've been, well, not exactly blogging. That will change, and soon. In the meantime, have a pimping little placeholder. My first bloghop experience is to come, soon!
Also, a new short story to be released, er... shortly!

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Just throwing this out there. Look at my header! So pretty! Guess I should spend as much care on the stuff that will go under it. Like the books I'm writing. Eep.