I LOVE TIME TRAVEL STORIES. I love to read them, watch them, write them. My current obsession is Diana Gabaldon’s wonderful (and lengthy! Hurray!) time travel romance series OUTLANDER. Love the books and now am enjoying the DVD of the first season of the TV series. More on that in a minute.
My young adult science fiction series PARALLELOGRAM has a whole time travel element to it, which is why I’m thrilled to tell you that the first book in the series, INTO THE PARALLEL, has been selected for inclusion in a fantastic TIME TRAVEL STORY BUNDLE featuring some of the top names in science fiction and fantasy.
Here’s what’s in the bundle:
The initial titles in the bundle (minimum $5 to purchase) are:
The Rock by Bob Mayer
Time Streams by Fiction River
Alternitech by Kevin J. Anderson
Time’s Mistress by Steven Savile
Parallelogram Book 1: Into the Parallel by Robin Brande
Lightspeed: Issue 28 by Lightspeed
If you pay more than the bonus price of just $14, you’ll get another six titles:
The Edwards Mansion by Dean Wesley Smith
Time Traveled Tales by Jean Rabe
The Trinity Paradox by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason
Summer of Love by Lisa Mason
Ansible by Stant Litore
Snipers by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
This incredible book bundle is available for only 3 weeks. I know you’re going to want to buy it–we all are. But as a special bonus for buying it now, in the first 48 hours it’s on sale, I’m throwing in a TIME TRAVEL PRIZE PACK GIVEAWAY. Because we all want more!
One lucky winner will receive:
- The DVD of OUTLANDER Season 1, Volume 1, just in time to start watching the series when it resumes next month.
- The DVD of my favorite time travel movie, Richard Curtis’s ABOUT TIME. Love this movie so much, I want to make sure everyone in the world sees it. And at least one person besides me owns it so you can watch it over and over.
- The PARALLELOGRAM Omnibus Edition, which includes the complete 4-book PARALLELOGRAM series. No waiting in between cliffhangers! Everything right there for the reading!
Now here’s the interesting thing about the giveaway: Unlike with most giveaways, your chances to win this one actually improve the more people you share it with. When you enter, you’ll get a special code to include on your own tweets or posts about the giveaway, and when someone enters using that code, you get 3 EXTRA ENTRIES for yourself. How cool is that?
So there you have it: In the next 48 hours you can buy 13 exciting time travel books AND enter to win more books and a couple of movies. Not bad for a Wednesday!
Here’s the link again to buy the TIME TRAVEL STORY BUNDLE.
And here’s where to go to enter the TIME TRAVEL PRIZE PACK GIVEAWAY.
Good luck everyone, and happy reading!
I thought you might be interested in traveling with me on my experience of trying to get an adult fiction story published.
This story was first written in 2004 at over 8,000 words. The story came to me in a dream. In the dream, nightmare really, I was sitting in a lifeboat that was being lowered alongside the Titanic. I was screaming at my husband to get into the lifeboat and he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t answer or say anything, no emotion. I woke up when the lifeboat started falling exremely fast (nightmare fast) and I realized that he was going to die when the ship sank and that indeed, I did love him. Despite everything, I did still love him. What woke me up was the panicky feeling I got when I “realized” it was the real thing. I wasn’t dreaming or in an illusion, but was really alongside the Titanic in April of 1912.
That was the tidbit given to me that I felt compelled to turn into a story. A story about a thirty-something wife who is willing to risk her family to win ten million dollars on a reality television show in which they must survive the sinking of the Titanic. She is sick and tired of being lower middle class and waiting for it to be her turn in life. Her husband has spent his entire life dreaming of being a published children’s book author. Unbeknowest to her, the family actually time travels and she finds out that reality is not always what we think it to be.
I was also inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton and especially, the following verse:
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
In the end of 2004, I cut the story down to about 5,000 words and had it critiqued by writers. Amazing Journeys Magazine editor Edward Knight was kind enough to write a little hand-written message that he was sorry it didn’t work for him. Glimmer Train magazine then rejected it but was kind enough to add “It was a good read.” Asimov’s Science Fiction sent a form rejection letter.
In the meantime, I re-wrote it and re-wrote it and had it critiqued several times.
Then the story got put into a file and sat there. I pulled it out in the spring of 2007 and hacked it down to about 2,000 words. Dragons, Knights & Angels online magazine gave me a particularly harsh rejection. I filed it then joined a new writer’s group. I revised but stuck to the 2000 words. They critiqued it. It was missing something. But one of the writers told me after that she really liked it. I needed to keep at it.
So, I put it away again. This love-hate relationship with my story. I revised it again and ended up with nearly 5,000 words.
I recently sent it to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine and it didn’t grab John Adams interest.
I sent it out again today and I will let you know. When we have at least 25 rejections (we have 5 to date) I will post the story on my blog because it will be safe to call it simply “unpublishable”. It may very well be exactly that. I am not sure that I will ever learn how to figure that out, what is ‘publishable’ and what is not.
Here is the opening passage of my story titled Poe’s Titanic:
Denise Orlowski sat in the lifeboat and stared at the Titanic’s davits against the deep blackness of the midnight sky. The pulleys creaked and moaned from the weight of Lifeboat Number 9, and she knew in an abstract, thoughtless way that the Atlantic Ocean lie in wait for her husband like a black hole that would suck him in then spit out his frozen corpse. With all of her children huddled around her and her baby tucked in tight beneath her costume shawl, she gloated. Denise had devised a plan for their survival and had executed that plan with near perfection.
Where will my story end up????
I generally listen to the opinion of booksellers, and so I was pleased to take one of my favorite booksellers up on her recommendation that I read Little Hoot by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illustrated by Jen Corace.
Little Hoot is a young owl from a conventional owl family. He attends school, of course, so he knows what other youngsters are up to. And he knows that they all go to bed at a reasonable time.
Why can't he go to bed at a reasonable time, too?
But no, Mom and Dad both insist that he stay up just one . . . more . . . hour.
You simply must read this book. MUST, do you hear me? Because the dialogue and the story and the illustrations are all pitch-perfect. The parents sound like parents, Little Hoot and friends play like real kids, and the pictures are so cute that you really, really want to squish the little owl in a squishy, huggy way.
I'd say more, but I see that Betsey Bird at Fuse #8 has already done so, so I say - Go. Read her review. And then, read the book.
My apologies for disappearing! I’ve been going through a major life change: MOVING. In the space of a few weeks, we sold our home (in Grand Prairie, TX where we had lived for 18 years raising two kids) and moved into the big city (of Dallas, where we’re 10 minutes from my favorite theaters, movies, museums, and restaurants!). Each Friday has brought a new crisis: first no electricity for two days, then no Internet for four days! EEK! Things are headed toward normalcy now and it’s time to get back on track with poetry. I’ve actually been reading a lot of poetry during this time as part of the Cybils award (I’m on the poetry subcommittee; stay tuned for news); it’s the perfect antidote.
As I looked for a poem to fit my current circumstance, I remembered a lovely picture book collection that came out a few years ago: My House is Singing by Betsy Rosenthal, illustrated by Margaret Chodos-Irvine. Each poem captures an aspect of the “places and spaces that make a house a home” against a backdrop of Chodos-Irvine’s colorful, sculptural collages. Using a variety of poetic forms, including rhyming and free verse forms, Rosenthal touches on details that children notice in the laundry room, the smoke detector, the refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner, the kitchen, special cubby-holes, the doorbell, the back door, and more. The following poem example gives the book it’s title and captures some of my own thoughts my first night in my new home:
My House’s Night Song
By Betsy Rosenthal
Listen closely.
Can you hear?
Heater whooshing out
warm air.
Blinds flapping
Floors creaking.
Clocks ticking.
Faucet leaking.
Dishwasher clicking.
Pipes pinging.
Listen closely.
My house is singing.
From: Rosenthal, Betsy. R. 2004. My House is Singing. Illustrated by Margaret Chodos-Irvine. San Diego: Harcourt.
It’s time for me to re-join the Poetry Friday Round Up-- which is hosted this week by Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect.
Picture: My new house
by Marc Rosenthal
HarperCollins 2007
Exactly.
There's an old adage that care should be taken when choosing a title that can instantly sum up someone's opinion.
Using the "nothing ever happens around here" idea we see a boy kick-the-can dejectedly through town while endless calamity takes place behind his back. At the very end something does happen that makes him change his mind. To be
Happy new home! And what a lovely reflective poem.
Congratulations on the move, Sylvia! And enjoy your new digs! May your new house sing happy songs for years to come.
Thanks so much! It's particularly fun to "break in" a new home at Christmastime. We still have boxes to unpack, but the tree is up and the lights are twinkling...
Sylvia,
I hope you are happy in your new home. I've been living in the same house since 1976.
I like MY HOUSE IS SINGING and the poem you selected from it to post today.
Happy Holidays!!! I look forward to our discussions about the Cybils poetry nominations.
Thanks, Elaine. Yes, I am enjoying the Cybils reading and hope to jump into the dialogue shortly. Just scrambling to catch up... Happy holidays to you, too!
Happy new home, Sylvia. Half my relatives live in Dallas, so tell them hey.
Susan T.
Chicken Spaghetti
Thanks, Susan. And come on by the next time you're in town visiting family-- or not visiting family, as the case may be. :-)