Hmmm. Tricky one. Which way do you go – machine, wormhole, spirit guide, something-plugged-into-the-brain…? So many choices, so many pitfalls.
A few years ago I was watching a film on TV that my wife wanted to watch but about which I wasn’t that bothered, and my attention drifted lazily to the door into the kitchen next to the TV, and I started to imagine all the people that had gone through that doorway since the house was built sixty or so years ago. Something in my head suddenly went BOOM!, and I immediately grabbed my notebook and started making furious notes about a troubled teenager who could see the past all around him. And thus a novel was born that became ‘The Multiverse of Max Tovey‘, published on August 31st by EG Publishing.
I felt I had a new twist on the whole Time Travel thing, in that my hero travels through time and physical space (not actual space – I’ll leave that to Dr Who) by focusing on these worlds that exist in his peripheral vision and then fixing them into a new reality. Yes, Time Traveler’s Wife was also about someone with something wrong with his brain, but he couldn’t control it – Max can, eventually, as can others in his world, he discovers. But no spoilers…
Many authors start off with a complete book plotted out. I don’t. I start at the beginning and see where it takes me, and when you’re writing about Time Travel, one accidental line can suddenly take you off in a direction you just hadn’t considered, but which is even more exciting than where you thought you were going. This happened a lot while I was writing TMOMT. The Butterfly Effect is especially strong when you’re dealing with Time Travel, and I frequently had to stop writing and get my head around all the changes to the future that Max’s actions in the past would have. Needless to say, this usually involved a trip for myself and my notebook to the pub, and pages of rapidly written possibilities connected by increasingly spidery arrows.
But when you also start dealing with The Otherworld, you really start making life difficult for yourself – but I’ve said too much…
Alastair Swinnerton 