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I’m chatting today with Tracy Barrett, the author of several middle grade novels, including the ghost story Cold in Summer, the time travel adventure On Etruscan Time, The Sherlock Files series, about descendants of Sherlock Holmes who tackle his unsolved mysteries, and the brand-new YA novel King of Ithaka. Post a comment on this interview, and we’ll randomly choose one lucky winner to receive a copy of King of Ithaka.

Chris Eboch: Tell us about King of Ithaca.

My YA novel King of Ithaka is based on Homer’s Odyssey, and is about the search for Odysseus by Odysseus’ son, Telemachos. I realized that my hero needed a sidekick, and for some reason, this sidekick popped into my head as a centaur. I think the reason is that while I was writing this book centered around a teenage boy, there were a lot of teenage boys in my house, they often seemed half beast, like a centaur!

Once I had committed to the centaur, I felt free to use other “critters” who turn out to be important to the plot, including a sphinx-like seeress, a triton (half man, half sea-creature), and various nymphs.

CE: what inspires you to write speculative fiction?

I wrote Cold in Summer (which features a ghost) after swimming in a lake that had been formed when a dam was built on a small river, drowning a town in the valley. That seemed creepy to me, and when I heard that there was a hole in the hill that cold air came out of in the summer and warm air in the winter, I just knew I had to do something with a ghost.

The impetus for my time-travel novel On Etruscan Time came from a trip to Italy with my then-13-year-old son. One day he stepped into a Renaissance church in the middle of Rome and said, “I’ve gone back in time 500 years.” Then he stepped out on the street and said, “I’ve gone ahead 500 years. Rome is a big time-travel machine.”

CE: Are there special challenges in writing speculative fiction? How do you deal with them?

The challenges I faced in King of Ithaka were enjoyable, since I like solving puzzles. For instance, how do you get a centaur onto a small boat without tipping it over? What language would a half man, half sea-creature speak? What does a sphinx eat?

The big challenge in On Etruscan Time was that I set it up where the time-traveler couldn’t communicate with anyone in the past and couldn’t move objects in the past (this is to avoid the paradox about what if you go into the past and do something that makes your grandfather never be born? Then you wouldn’t be born either, so you wouldn’t go to the past, so your grandfather would be born, and so would you, and you’d go to the past and do something to prevent his being born, etc.). But my hero had to prevent an Etruscan kid from being unjustly executed for a crime he didn’t commit–2500 years earlier. How could he do that if he couldn’t warn the boy he was being framed, or move the objects that caused him to be condemned? I lay awake at night a lot about that one, but I solved it!

CE: If you could live in a sci-fi or fantasy world not of your own making, which would it be? Why?

Time travel to the past, hands down. I’m curious about so many people and events of the past—much more so than about the future. But I’m reliant on modern things like dentistry, running water, zippers, cameras, etc., so I would have to have a guaranteed return ticket