Book #1:
There is a link to Amazon for the title book in each blog. Additional links are provided to original short stories involved in the development of the title book in the description of each story below.
Elevator Speech
Traveler’s HOT L presents journies through time by eight adventurers. Each traveler’s reason for taking their trip is as unique as the outcome of their experience. The HOTL's time travel has rules and alien proprietors.
Background
The original Traveler’s HOT L was a stand-alone short story, one of four time travel related short stories that found their way into this book, my first published novel. There was no master plan for the stories until late 2012 when I retired from full-time teaching and began serious writing.
Traveler's HOT L was named Winner for Science Fiction by the 2014 USA Best Book Awards.
Written as time travel stories, four tales are the core of the anthology. Each of the four had its own version a time travel mechanism. The original versions of these stories were fleshed out to address what had become a common time travel method. Other content was added to tie the storyline to the HOT L. Finally, backstory, details not included in the original version because of length restrictions, and some new plot points were added.
I've linked PDF files of each original short story to the title of that short story before inclusion in Traveler's HOT L - The Time Traveler's Resort. Take a read of the original. Then read the same story in the book. Let me know what you think.
I've linked PDF files of each original short story to the title of that short story before inclusion in Traveler's HOT L - The Time Traveler's Resort. Take a read of the original. Then read the same story in the book. Let me know what you think.
Thoughts on each of those stories follow.
Plot points were added to four non-time travel stories. Those were included to round out the eight slots in the book. They were all complete stories without a time travel slant. Molding them into time travel tales was harder than I thought it would be.
Hardcore time travel aficionados don’t care for these converted stories. Their most common complaint is that time travel plays a minor role in the story. Other complaints center around the fact that one of those is humor genre, one is detective genre, and two are sci-fi but not time travel focused.
The descriptions of those four stories are the topic of next week’s blog.
1. Eternity and Chronos debuted in Traveler’s HOT L. That story is titled Caught in the Middle in this book and is the first story in the anthology. Pools of time in different rooms, the wrinkling walls, and the electric shock all originated in this story. The original version ends where Shaina opens the door and steps into the Middle Ages.
While I never had a problem leaving the rest of the story to the reader’s imagination, many readers complained. Most of those are now happy. This is a classic time travel story in every sense.
2. Time synchronizers Tempus and Epoch debuted in my short story titled, Michael Casey O’Brien. In this anthology, its title is Relatively Speaking. This was the second of my short stories that included time travel. It was written before the original Traveler’s HOT L and is the origin of the idea of time as fabric.
The time travel component is minimal in this story. That was pointed out nicely but firmly in a thorough review of Traveler’s HOT L - The Time Traveler’s Resort done by Paul Wandason at www.Time2TimeTravel.com. More on Paul later in this post and in the post dedicated to Patterns on Pages, the fourth volume in the Traveler’s HOT L series.
3. The short story DNA Trek provided the last element to the final time travel mechanism in this book. In DNA Trek, resonating DNA molecules allow travel to specific times and to return the traveler to her/his real time. The main character in DNA Trek is limited to places his family lived in this story due to resonating DNA molecules. The idea of allowing/causing the time traveler to forget all/part of a trip was spawned here, too. Wandason (see above) thinks this story should be expanded more into at least a novella. We shall see.
In this anthology, DNA Trek plays the role of an antagonist. Follow this link to the original version. Compare it to how the story read when time synchronizers and HOT L proprietors discover an illegitimate time traveler is traversing their time fabric.
4. Hocus Pocus Bogus was the original title of Million Dollar Mistake, the last true time travel story in this anthology. The original story came from the idea of unexpected retribution. All the time travel discussion and occurrence in Million Dollar Mistake is the close of the story. Time travel is, however, always was integral to the storyline.
I did a lot of research on printing presses, printer’s ink, government specifications for paper and ink, and the thick and weight of a $.20.00 bill. I was shocked at the amount of space a million dollars in twenty-dollar bills requires. It’s also very heavy!
You've reached the end of the first of the 2018 Book Tour blog posts.
Tune in next week for the inside scoop on the four remaining stories in Traveler’s HOT L – The Time Traveler’s Resort.
Tune in next week for the inside scoop on the four remaining stories in Traveler’s HOT L – The Time Traveler’s Resort.
I've posted a 113 page PDF file with samples from all my published books and three as yet unpublished manuscripts. This provides a comprehensive overview of genre and style. I invite you to download the file. Enjoy the read.
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