How I Wrote and Published My Debut Novel

Sitting in the lobby of the historic Hassayampa Inn in Prescott, Arizona, I sipped my coffee and stared at the period pieces surrounding me. It was January 1, 2015 when my eyes landed on the switchboard, circa 1927, and I started day dreaming. What might it have looked like, some young person sitting at the station, routing calls between the guestrooms and the rest of the country? I pictured the roaring 20’s, the coming market crash, the world plunged into the Great Depression, ultimately bringing about World War II and it’s horrifying consequences. What if I could go back and warn them? Stop it somehow?

Thus, began this journey back to 1929, where I sent our hero, Harold, to meet Talia Sanders, the operator. Over the course of the next couple of years—in real time—he navigated the interceding nine decades, traveling back and forth, trying to change the past, and, when he fails, to prevent the same thing from happening in the present.

As the story unfolded in my mind, I had one major problem; most time travel stories break down because of unresolved paradoxes. If you visit the past, don’t you automatically change it by your presence? What if you only go back a few months or years? You run the risk of meeting your younger self, which is a real no-no in terms of theoretical physics. How, then, could I get around it?

The main concern, as far as I could see, was this little thing called the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, If you take a human being and transport him into the past, you simultaneously remove his bulk from the present and insert into another epoch. The Universe should implode immediately upon such a distortion. The answer? Well, if modern theory is right, we can hitch a ride through a wormhole, traveling unimaginable distances across the galaxy without disrupting the flow of time. So why not a slimmed down version to permit local excursions? Why not a ‘squirmhole?”

Join Harold as he wanders through time in order to prevent the past from repeating itself.