If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know how much I enjoy. Jennifer Macaire’s writing. So I’m delighted to have her here talking about her next book.
A Remedy in Time
Thank you for having me as a guest on your blog! I’m here to talk about my newest time travel book, ‘A Remedy in Time’, and what inspired me to write it.
I’ve had a passion for time travel ever since I found out about dinosaurs. I admit I’ve watched the Jurassic Park series about a hundred times. The dinosaurs never get boring for me. When I was in kindergarten, I stood at the blackboard and drew huge dinos. A t-rex chased a triceratops, a stegosaurus lumbered across a swamp, while a huge brontosaurus (now known as apatosaurus, which is a pity, given that brontosaurus meant “thunder lizard”) grazed on high tree tops. One of my teachers discovered my obsession, and she would take me from class to class so I could draw and give a talk about dinosaurs.
Then one day I happened on a Reader’s Digest that featured sabretooth tigers. In the illustration, the tigers are attacking a mammoth that has somehow gotten entrapped in a tar-pit. I stared at that illustration for hours, trying to imagine how the sabretooth tigers could hunt and eat their prey with such massive canines.
That was that for the dinosaurs. Suddenly I was fascinated by a time when woolly mammoths, huge cave bears, and even sloths the size of small houses, roamed the frigid plains of the ice-age tundra. The sabretooth tiger, with its out-sized canines became my spirit animal – I read everything I could about them, and spent my time drawing pictures of extinct mammals. Needless to say, the sabretooth tiger was the beast that really caught my interest.
Years and years later, I stumbled on a blogsite that featured fossils, and it amused me to try and guess the mystery photos the author posted. And then one day, lo and behold, there was a sabretooth tiger! I recognized it right away. In the blog post, the author admitted that scientists still argued about how the animal hunted its prey. I started imagining a trip to the past to film a documentary about sabretooth tigers.
Of course, the trip would start at Tempus U, where my time travel books all start from. And the heroine this time would be a single-minded young woman who not only specialized in paleolithic animals but infectious diseases as well, because when I started writing the book, there had been a breakout of an especially virulent form of typhus in California. And so I wove a story about corporate greed, vaccines, man-made diseases, and a trip to the far, far past. A Remedy in Time is available for preorder, and will be published January 7th, 2021!
And here is the fabulous cover my publisher, Headline Accent, made for it!
To save the future, she must turn to the past . . .
San Francisco, Year 3377. A deadly virus has taken the world by storm. Scientists are desperately working to develop a vaccine. And Robin Johnson – genius, high-functioning, and perhaps a little bit single-minded – is delighted. Because, to cure the disease, she’s given the chance to travel back in time.
But when Robin arrives at the last Ice Age hoping to stop the virus at its source, she finds more there than she bargained for. And just as her own chilly exterior is beginning to thaw, she realises it’s not only sabre-toothed tigers that are in danger of extinction . . .
Jennifer is an American living in Paris. She likes to read, eat chocolate, and plays a mean game of golf. She grew up in upstate New York, Samoa, and the Virgin Islands. She graduated from St Peter and Paul High School in St Thomas and moved to NYC where she modelled for five years for Elite. She went to France and met her husband at the polo club. All that is true. But she mostly likes to make up stories.
I lay with my face in the grass. I hadn’t vomited, but that’s only because I couldn’t take a full breath. I knew that as soon as my diaphram started working again I’d spill my guts. It didn’t take long. “Why, oh why, did I agree to this,” I said, between bouts of retching and paralyzing pain. Finally, I managed to get to my knees. “What if a sabre tooth tiger had been here? We’d already be eaten, or worse.”
He shook his head. “See how the air around us is faintly blue? We’re protected by the tractor beam for a good hour. Nothing can get in.”
I reached out my hand and touched the blue-tinged air. It was a little like being surrounded by a very faint fog. I poked. My finger tingled and stung. “Wo cao!” I said. As I watched, the blue shivered and began to fade. “It’s almost gone. Let’s go. We should send some vidcams out and see if there are any spots that look like a good campsite.”
Donnell looked at his comlink.
“What time is it?” I asked. “Is time here different, I wonder? It was nearly noon when we left the, um, future.” I glanced at my own comlink. “It’s one minute to one. Amazing. We go back ten thousand years in little more than an hour. A-fucking-mazing. Look at this place!” Mouth open in amazement, I gazed around. We were on the side of a grassy hill, and we had a good view of the surrounding area. I forgot about my pain, I was in the past! I was here! I staggered to my feet and looked around. “Wa cao! We’re really here! There is a ta me da giant armadillo down there. Putain, a glyptodon! This is amazing. Look at that! It looks like a walking igloo except it’s brown, not white. Donnell, look!”
Donnell didn’t look at the scenery. He looked at me, and said, “Robin, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I’m really very sorry. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.” He looked truly upset.
I hastened to reassure him. “No need to apologise. Look, I know you didn’t want to have me as a partner. I overheard you talking to the dean. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just make this trip a success. We have many lives depending on us.”
He made a strange noise. Then his face turned ashen, and he gagged like he was about to be sick. I thought he was still feeling the effects of the trip. I bent to help him to his feet, but he gagged again, then screamed.
“What is it? Donnell? What is happening?” I didn’t understand what I was seeing. His leg, hislegwas shrinking. He shrieked, grabbed his leg, and his hands sank into his, well, where his thigh should have been, and then he sort of slid and slumped to the ground, convulsing, his body moving as if waves were tossing it, as if he were made of liquid, and his clothes became wet, and the strongest, strangest smell assaulted my nose.
I think I started to scream then too. Then my breath ran out and all I could do was squeak, squeak, squeak, as I tried to drag air into my lungs.
He must have been in dreadful pain. He screamed until the end. Until all that was left was his chest and his head, then those too sank into themselves and all that was left were clothes and boots, and a pink, foamy gel.
I spun around and flailed at the air, at the faint wisp of blue that still lingered. I found my voice. “Help!” I screamed, “Help, help, help!”
No one came. Below me, in the valley, the glyptodon lifted its head and seemed to look in my direction.
I couldn’t stop shaking, and I couldn’t seem to be able to breathe. Black spots danced in front of my vision and I knelt down, bent over, and hit my head on the ground. “No. No. No! That didn’t just happen. It’s a hallucination. You’re still unconscious. You’ll wake up in a minute. Wake up, Robin. Wake the feck up.” I dug my fingers into the dirt and screamed again.
‘Coercive control’ is a form of domestic abuse that has started to be taken much more seriously over the past few years, especially since the Serious Crime Act in 2015. It’s not a new thing and there have been many stories and films featuring it over the years. In fact, ‘gaslighting’, when the perpetrator convinces the victim that the abuse is all in their head, takes its name from the 1940 film ‘Gaslight’.
Like many men, I had my suspicions that coercive control was mainly an invention of militant feminism and that, if it happened at all, it happened to weak women who were, to a degree, complicit in their abuse. Since then two separate friends of mine, both strong, confident women, have fallen victim to this sort of relationship. It’s a terrifying problem and people (mainly, but not exclusively, women) need to be aware of the behaviour and its dangers.
This makes Karen King’s latest, The Stranger in my Bed, a timely novel.
Phil and Freya have married after a whirlwind romance. Two years later, the marriage is in trouble with rows that often turn violent. Mind games are being played. But who is the abuser and who is the victim? At this point, though, Phil is involved in a car crash when his brakes are tampered with. He wakes in hospital with no memory of the abuse. All he recalls is the courtship and marriage.
King’s book, then, sets out to tackle several different issues.
It’s a straightforward whodunit. Who tampered with the brakes (and continues a campaign to harass Phil, breaking into his house and leaving threatening notes in his home office)?
It’s (as it says on the cover) a psychological thriller. Is Freya really in danger from Phil or is it all in her mind? Or is Freya the abuser?
It’s a sort of romance. Given the chance to start again, can Phil and Freya rekindle the love that characterised the courtship and honeymoon that Phil remembers or are they doomed to remain in the cycle of abuse?
The story is told in the third person but with chapters from the point of view of different characters. Mainly it’s straightforwardly from Freya’s viewpoint but some chapters are from Phil’s point of view. Phil sees himself as a loving husband. OK, he can lose his temper from time to time, but then his wife, as he puts it “always presses his buttons”. Some of her behaviour (I can’t give examples because of spoilers) goes way beyond what I would consider acceptable in a marriage and I found my sympathies moving to Phil. Karen King’s willingness to forgive the kind of behaviour that would suggest a marriage has already broken down makes me uncomfortable and blurs some of the lines in the book. It certainly doesn’t fit well with the “can they get their marriage back on course” subplot. Surely the marriage is doomed? But, given the structure of many romantic novels, maybe there will be a happy ending after all.
Karen King has a lifetime of writing romance behind her and her writing flows well. All the bits that could be in a romance novel read just as they should. Nice, normal Freya, her handsome sexy husband, their comfortable home, her interesting job. But the ‘psychological thriller’ elements are less comfortable. I felt that there wasn’t quite enough menace for it to work as a thriller. Perhaps that’s what makes coercive control so insidious. It’s very difficult to believe that there can be a real threat lurking in such an apparently ‘normal’ home. Some authors of psychological thrillers introduce a pet animal at this stage – as with the rabbit whose fate gave rise to the expression ‘bunny boiler’ in ‘Fatal Attraction’. Dogs, too, have met grisly ends in plenty of films and books. I have a twisted mind: I miss that sort of peril in a thriller.
Bunnies nervously considering possible plot twists
In summary, this is a romance author who is tackling an important, and very unromantic, subject. It has meant breaking away from her usual style to explore a new genre and, inevitably, there is some grinding of gears as the drive engages with a whole new terrain. But it’s an important subject and one that her audience probably isn’t that familiar with. It’s well written and carries the reader along and anything that makes people more aware of the issues is to be applauded.
We’re just a week off Halloween now and normally I’d be worrying about my costume for the street-skaters’ Halloween skate.
The Halloween skate is probably the social highlight of the skate year and the after-party has been listed in London’s Evening Standard newspaper as one of the best Halloween parties in the capital. The costumes are amazing.
This year there will be no Halloween skate. Although it is outdoors it does mean hundreds of people skating quite close together. So, alas, no scenes like these:
I’ll miss it.
If you are missing Halloween events too, can I recommend that you curl up with my novella, Dark Magic? I wrote it exactly a year ago for Halloween 2019.
Like all the best Halloween tales, it combines a scary story with dark humour that (according to its reviews) really makes people laugh. And it’s only £1.99 on Kindle. Or, if you want a low-calorie alternative to high-sugar Halloween treats, why not buy it in paperback for just £4.99?
In keeping with my promise last week that I am going to cut back slightly on blogging, I’m going to stop doing all my book reviews as separate Tuesday blogs. So here, as my first Friday book review for a while is a look at Kirsten McKenzie’s latest. Like all of us, Kirsten has had to revise her plans for her book launch because of covid and the book is officially being launched in her native New Zealand in November. It is, though, already available on Amazon and you can buy it HERE.
Kirsten has moved away from her time-shift historical novels to immerse herself thoroughly in horror and The Forger and the Thief is a full-on Gothic novel with all the trademark tropes of the genre: horror, death, and romance, with a suitable side-order of religious references and morality.
The story is set in Florence in 1966. It revolves around five people, although there is a substantial supporting cast. Although they all have names, the chapters refer to them by the iconic types they represent: the Guest, the Wife, the Student, the Cleaner (more accurately the Thief) and the Policeman. All but the Student have guilty secrets in their past and even the Student, though not carrying any guilt, is living with the horror of having survived the Nazi death camps.
The characters are drawn with a fairly broad brush (though some who are painted very dark do redeem themselves at the end). That’s fine in a Gothic novel and it does mean that, although the story seems confusing at first with several parallel narratives that only slowly come to intertwine, there is none of that flipping backwards and forwards to remember who people are that can take you out of a story. You always know whether we are looking at the woman fleeing an abusive husband, or the concentration camp survivor, or the policewoman (a more significant character than the Policeman, I thought, but casual sexism was all the rage in 1966). There is a lot of fun as we begin to see the links between them.
The narrative takes place in November. The winter rains have turned the river Arno into a raging torrent, which bursts its banks and floods Florence. The River itself features as a character in the novel and the sense of its destructive power is one of the strongest things about the book.
As the river hits town, all the plans and intrigues of the characters are literally swept up in the cataclysm that will leave several of them dead. I’m certainly not going to spoil the suspense by telling you which ones.
This is not a deep and meaningful book but it does race along. Like all the best stories it leaves you wanting to know what happens next. I didn’t start with high expectations, but I was soon caught up in the narrative, putting aside some much worthier books as I rushed on to get to the end.
I’m pretty well all blogged out this week. Besides my own blog, I’ve been writing on those of several other generous authors who have given me space so that I can encourage people to buy Burke in the Peninsula.
Those of you who have been following me through the year will know that that I’ve been busy with the relaunch of the three existing Burke books before getting this one out. It’s been a new experience for me, this venture into self-publication. Emotionally, and in terms of my development as an author (if there is such a thing), it’s been worthwhile. The books that I have published under my own imprint (Big Red) are all doing better than the ones that were left with a traditional publisher.
It’s been hard work, though. Authors always complain that their publishers don’t give them promotional support. Now I’m my own publisher I’ve learned quickly that promotional support is expensive. I’ve read advice that you should start with trivial sums and see what happens and I can tell you that what happens is absolutely nothing. It may be that I interpreted “trivial” too literally, but I’m not about to put down more money with no evidence that ads on Facebook or Amazon are ever going to pay for themselves.
In the past I’ve given talks at bookshops, book clubs, book fairs, and even a Victorian event where most of the audience turned up in costume.
This year, though, talks are off (though if you work for a college that has an educational exemption, feel free to get in touch).
So if I can’t advertise my books and I can’t talk to people about them, what have I done?
I’ve blogged (on my own blogs and anyone else who’ll have me), I’ve tweaked my website, I’ve posted on Facebook and I’ve worked Twitter for all it’s worth. Does this have any effect? Well, as I’ve said, the books that I’m putting all this effort into are doing noticeably better than those left with a regular publisher. Sales, though, are disappointing – partly because, though you might think that the covid crisis would make people read more, it seems to be having the opposite effect. Many people find it hard to settle with a book. Netflix’s share price gives a fair indication of where people are turning for entertainment.
I’ve read suggestions that I need to make my blogs more focused on action points, which I guess means trying to get you to buy the books. Looking back, I’m delighted to see how many people read blog posts that are about my books and who might, I suppose, go on to buy them. (Given that hundreds of people read the blog posts every week and rather fewer buy the books, I’m not sure that that works, but perhaps you haven’t all got round to hitting Amazon yet.) I can’t help feeling, though, that people do like to read posts that are not primarily about selling my books – like the one on the dangers of using contemporary paintings in historical research or my instant summary of the British invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806.
I enjoy writing random essays on the history behind some of my novels and even more random discussions of totally off topic things like tango. The fact that I do enjoy it is one of the main reasons that I have kept going for several years now producing a blog post practically every week. In fact, many weeks I do a book review as well, so that’s well over 60 blog posts every year, sometimes with a couple of weeks off over Christmas and maybe a week away in the summer. I probably write well over 50,000 words a year this way – or much more than half of a book.
Experience has shown that blog posts only get read if you draw people’s attention to them through social media. In my case, my main social media effort is through Twitter. I used to hate Twitter but, over the years, I have made virtual friends there who I would really miss if I abandoned the platform.
So both blogging and tweeting give me some satisfaction, but what I have learned over the past few months is that self-publishing is time consuming and writing those blogs is time consuming too. Twitter shouldn’t be time consuming but I like to engage with people rather than just tweet and run and that means breaking off from what I am doing several times a day and that cuts into productive time quite a lot too. The result is that, looking back, I see that while I have published a new book and republished old ones, and contributed to a new short story collection, organised covers, checked on sales, responded to reader queries, blogged every week and chatted to folks on Twitter, what I haven’t done is written any books to publish in the future.
I feel that now is perhaps the time to take a small step back from all this promotional effort. I’ve noticed that when covid first struck readership of my blog dropped off. (Back to what I just said about reading and Netflix.) With people relaxing after the end of the initial lockdown, my readership recovered. Now, as we get more nervous, it’s beginning to drop again. So perhaps this would be a good time to recycle some old posts from my previous ‘Blogger’ blog. Most of you won’t have read them and I suspect that, even if you did, you have probably forgotten them by now.
I’ll be cutting back a bit on Twitter too. I’ll still post, but not quite as often.
I have some writing-related projects I’ll be able to put more time into and I can work on my tango. We haven’t made a video since May and I’d like to do another. I’ll be able to visit Wales without climbing to the top of a hill so I can update the website. It will be fun. And when I get bored, I’ll come back. (Not that I’ll ever really be away.)
And now, in the spirit of my more relaxed approach to the blog, here are some photos from a summer that, when all is said and done, had some lovely bits.
PHOTOS
The Action Point
Do you like exciting stories set during the Napoleonic Wars? (Like Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe stories?)
Do you like stories about British spies confounding the country’s enemies? (Like Ian Fleming’s Bond?)
Do you like war stories?
Do you like Napoleonic history?
Do you like strong, sexy heroines?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘Yes’, then why aren’t you already reading Burke in the Peninsula?
It’s real history – but not like you learned it at school.
