Shakespeare, Time Travel, Macbeth

The Shakespeare Standard has an interview with Invisible Hand author James Hartley today, and his new "Shakespeare Moon" series sounds intriguing. The plot takes a contemporary kid back to Scotland and entangles him with the events of Macbeth. I think that's a fantastic idea. I never understood why high schools insisted on inflicting Julius Caesar on students as their first introduction to Shakespeare. Yes, yes, it's got "Friends, Romans, and Countrymen, lend me your ears" but it's really not one of the most riveting plays. But Macbeth?  It's got sex. It's got intrigue. It's got WITCHES. Start out with Macbeth and you might just end up with a kid who likes Shakespeare.

Here's the sales pitch:

The Invisible Hand is about a boy, Sam, who has just started life at a boarding school and finds himself able to travel back in time to medieval Scotland. There he meets a girl, Leana, who can travel to the future, and the two of them become wrapped up in events in Macbeth, the Shakespeare play, and in the daily life of the school. The book is the first part of a series called Shakespeare´s Moon. Each book is set in the same boarding school but focuses on a different Shakespeare play.

Picnic by the Lake of Time...out next week!

I have been playing around with a time travel idea for a while, and this novelette is going to be my first in the series. Hare is the opening:

The fifties were not my first choice as a time to seek refuge and 1955 was not my first choice of year, but as I did my research and exercised my due diligence, it became obvious that 1955 was probably the best place to lie low. For one thing, though I needed to hide somewhen fairly low-tech, I didn’t want to go so far into the past that I had to grow my own food and build my own house.

I also needed to pick a year where I could blend in without too much explanation.

The fifties were perfect for that. The decade had telephones and television and indoor plumbing and air conditioning but it didn’t have facial recognition software or stoplight cameras or laws requiring you to prove your citizenship when looking for a job. You might get asked to show your social security card, but it was easy enough to forge one of those with a totally meaningless SSN because in the days before computer databases, what were they going to do, make a long-distance call to another state to check a birth certificate?

Picnic by the Lake of Time

Tor.com put out a call for novella-length stories about time travel this month and I desperately wanted to submit something. I love time travel stories and this "story bunny" has been drifting around for years. But as I started writing the story, I realized that it was just a story--that it had a finite beginnin and a finite ending and there was no way I could stretch the story out to 20K novella length.

At the same time, I saw this cover on Book Cover Designer and realized it would be a perfect cover for the story. And though I'm really, really trying to increase my output of longer work, I decided that sometimes a story is just a story. So by the Fourth of July, I'll have Picnic by the Lake of Time out in the world. The cover was designed by Ntasja Hellenthal of Beyond Book Covers. Find her here.

The Time Traveler's Almanac

I am a fan of short stories. I'm a fan of time travel stories. So this collection of short stories (edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer) sounds like it's right up my alley. And I would never have known about it if I hadn't stumbled across the cover in a review. I love this cover. I love that the butterfly is a call out to one of my all-time favorite short stories, Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." I remember reading that story for the first time and just being stunned by it. It was my introduction to Ray Bradbury and, most likely, the beginning of my life-long love of the short story form.

This is not the first cover this book has. When I went searching for it on Amazon--because to see it is to buy it--an older cover came up. And for me, the older cover was not as inviting. Maybe it's the background color. I used to work in print magazines and one of the things we were always doing is gathering data on which covers sold the best. (Covers with white backgrounds were not that popular.) For me this alternate cover looks like it might be a work of popular history or popular science. It doesn't say "fiction" to me the way the butterfly cover does. But either way, this book is on its way to me and I can't wait.

#HEARTBLAZE--Twilight with a Bite!

If you're looking for something new in paranormal romance, you might want to check out Heartblaze 1: Secret Soul, the debut novel by Shay Roberts. the story mixes a contemporary tale about a troubled college student name Emma Rue with a past life adventure when she was a vampire aristocrat. And just to make things more complicated, there's a vengeful ghost trying to manipulate her, an anti-paranormal organization that's out to kill her, and a conflicted werewolf who can't decide between his duty and his feelings.

There's a real depth of world-building here--an element most paranormal romances skip over--and real stakes at hand. This is Twilight with a bite,  a story with some edge to its emotions.

Heartblaze is a great read, and it's available worldwide.