Let me tell you a story.

Sometime last fall, I was sitting at my desk in my gloomy New York apartment, either contemplating my dwindling funds or the fact that I hadn’t finished an original, non-fanfic story longer than 6,000 words since I graduated from high school. Knowing me, it was probably the latter. I’ve always wanted to write; I’ve written as a matter of habit, since I could remember. Back when I was a kid in the ’80s, I wrote my own Choose Your Adventures, including deathless tomes like “Dreams” or “The Secret of Unicorn Valley.” There was this one boy in grade school who wanted me to write a Transformers Choose Your Own Adventure, but I declined because I was into fantasy and I didn’t like robots. I probably should have done it, since the boy was cute… but alas, I was too into wizards and unicorns. Thus, the joys of Starscream/Optimus Prime slash were thus forever lost to me.

But back to my desk. I remember the thought got stuck in my head… what if I could write something short, and that didn’t require research? I have been trying to write historical epics forever… and the same thing always happens. I always get bogged own in research, or some plot problem arises, and I never finish. I thought of what my friend Stephanie Dray told me: she too used to write grandiose epics, but then she wrote this short little paranormal thing, almost off the cuff, and she sold it almost immediately to Harlequin Nocturne. And now because of that, she’s actually back to her epics and selling them too. It seemed like there was a moral in there somewhere.

So I thought: what could I write quickly and easily? Well, what do I love? Time travel, natch. What wouldn’t require any research? Well, I came of age in the late ’80s, early ’90s, so something like that. The idea of having a young woman time traveling back to the age of Vanilla Ice and George Herbert Walker Bush was almost dazzling in its absurdity. But I must say, it was weirdly enticing. The early ’80s is really vague to me; but once we get to ’86-’87, everything becomes crystal clear in my memory. I can remember being there, trying to impress the other girls at school with my pastel pink skirt and matching blouse and shell bracelets, but at the same time sitting at home over the weekend playing Sierra PC games (like King’s Quest IV, and Police Quest II) obsessively. It seems so familiar, but at once really distant and strange.

I started thinking of what it was like back then, when I was in junior high. One of my teachers, a woman, recommended this sci-fi epic very enthusiastically to me. It was long and dense, but I had no problem tearing through it. But I remember nothing about it, other than a vague recollection of the cover (there were a lot of browns, reds and golds in it), and where it was in the stacks at Fairwood Library. But other than that– nada.

So… I’d sometimes wondered. What if I could travel back in time to 1989-1990 to the Fairwood library, go into the YA/romance/SF/fantasy section, and poke around? Would I be able to find this book again? Would I be able to find any other books that deeply influenced my thought processes at this tender age?

I mentioned this to my friend Laura Neubert as the germ of a story idea, and she immediately asked me what I could do to find this book. “No!” I exclaimed. “That’s not the point. I don’t care about the book, really. What about this as a story idea?”

“Someone goes back to 1989 or 1990 to find a book?” she asked skeptically. “There’s not much there.” I agreed. But there was something about idea that really grabbed me. Even now, it’s kind of hard to explain.

But Laura was right; there had to be something else there. I write romance, so I immediately thought there had to be a guy. But who would the guy be? Would it be the teacher? My teacher who’d recommended the book had been a woman– but for the sake of the story, she could be he, and a hot guy. A hot guy, who’d died suddenly and tragically, like one of my professors in college. And the heroine of the story used to have a crush on the teacher in high school, since he was one of the only adults in her life who didn’t ignore her; and when he died, she took it extraordinarily hard. She still carries a torch for him, and has never gotten over it because she’s never been in therapy, and she shies away from the sort of navel-gazing me and my friends are fond of. So she’s still hung up on the past, much to her detriment (but to the benefit of the story).

Once all these elements started coming together, I remember thinking, now we’re getting somewhere. So the story became about this woman who meets her former (dead) teacher once she’s in the past, and she falls in love with him, and she deals with the fallout of this relationship, and what happens when she saves his life. Part of it was a bit of a wish fulfillment fantasy, what I call a ‘boning your hot teacher’ story– but I took care with it so it wouldn’t be squicky. There’s a good chance that not all of you will agree. But I ran it by a bunch of people when I was editing, and more of you seem to like it than not, which is encouraging. In fact, some of you were so enthusiastic that I was kind of taken aback! In a good way, of course.

So I wrote it, and edited it, and started submitting it a few months ago. And to make a long story short– I ended up selling it to Champagne Books! It’s thrilling to sign on with a publisher who really believes in your work. “A Question of Time” is going to be coming out next year– November 2012. So mark your calendars! I’m going to have a bunch of contests, and I’ll be giving away a lot of fun stuff. Drop me a line if you have any ideas– I’d love to hear your suggestions.

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