Excerpt from Voyageurs

Here’s an excerpt from Voyageurs, the next book I will put through the query process:

(Wanda and Harold met me just outside the soup kitchen, on the cracked sidewalk, negative two years from my natural time —

“What now? I groused. “I was just about to eat lunch at the Mission.”

“Don’t be a bitch,” Harold said loftily, as Wanda looked down her nose at me as if I’d crawled out from under a rock. “We’ve got an experiment we need you to do.”

“Why me? I’m a Junior Birdman. You’re the King.” I knew, deep down, that I would do whatever Harold dared me to.

“You’re faster than I am. I need someone fast to do this. I bet you can’t do it, though.” Harold examined his hands, probably for invisible dirt specks, as I’d never seen him with his hands dirty.

“You bet I can’t do what?” I demanded.

“Change the outcome of that game over there.” Wanda interjected in her haughty voice.

“But that won’t work!” I groused. “The rock principle will keep it from changing. You can’t change time.”

“I’m going with you,” Harold reassured me. “We’re jumping a minute into the past to that shell game over there and you’re going to tip over the right cup so the mooch sees he’s getting conned.”

I protested. “By ‘we’, you mean me. How would I know where the ball landed?”

“You know,” Harold gritted his teeth. “You always know. I’ve seen you run that game.”

“You can’t change time. I try to change time and the cup won’t tip over. It always works that way.” I’d tried it — I could win the game with data I’d gleaned from the future, but I couldn’t change the outcome of the game itself.

“But what if I change one or two other things at the same time?” Harold smiled, and I felt his charm dissolve my reluctance. “How would the timeline know which event to change? With one or two other changes at once, I hope to confuse things so that you can tip the right cup and ruin the game.”

“But what about crossing ourselves?” I demanded. “I only get what — four minutes before crossing myself kills me?”

“You’ll have to do it quickly, I guess,” Harold shrugged. “Unless you don’t think you can — “

“Alright. I’ll do it.” I always knew I would.

We jumped to three minutes before the start of the round, and Wanda came with us as witness. She and Harold stepped back while I walked up to the game, which involved a mooch and a grifter as we called victims and fraudsters on the street.

I needed to reach in and tip the cup with the ball under it at the exact moment that the mooch would guess the whereabouts of the ball — and jump before the grifter caught my wrist and took me behind the nearest building to beat me to a pulp. I wondered why Harold would subject me to that risk, or the risk of crossing myself and being crushed. But he had faith in me …

One exhilarating moment later, I tipped the cup, revealing the ball to be in a different cup than it appeared to the mooch, and I jumped back to my present time without dying. I bent over, gasping and laughing.

“You’re the best,” Harold clapped me on the shoulder. “I knew you could do it. I think we should make a game of this. Call it — Voyageur. Like Traveller, but provocative.”

Then we blinked out of sight before the irate con artist reached us.)

Quirky Characters I Have Known

I think what drives me to write is the characters. My characters have been known to show up in my imagination during coffee hour. For example:

I sit in my favorite coffeehouse at the moment, a Starbucks in an expansive space at the corner of our college library. Grzegorz visits — he orders tea and brews it strong. He folds his lanky frame into the chair and cups his hands around his tea as if it was his chance of salvation. His copper hair spills down his shoulders and gets into his eyes. He speaks with a low, sibilant voice, sometimes halting to find a word. “Did I ever tell you about the time I had to pass as a college professor?”

“No!” I exclaimed. “How did you do that?”

“It’s actually pretty easy. Wear a tweed jacket, put on nerd glasses, wear the hair in a man bun — the bun was so tight it gave me headaches — and explain nonsense in an authoritative manner.”

“Hey! I protested. “I resemble that remark!”

Grzegorz chuckles and makes a defiant face at me.

Kat pops in occasionally — I mean literally pops in, because she’s a hereditary time traveler. This is her “natural time”, but chances are she set a bounce point in her favorite place, Starved Rock 1958, to get here.

“Hey,” she says, standing by the table, gazing with ice blue eyes. “Do you know what the hell that blonde espresso is?”

“As far as I can tell, it’s a light roast put through the espresso machine.”

“There’s no there there, if you know what I mean.” She brushed back the lock of white in her otherwise black hair. “Ian says he wants a blonde espresso — “

Ian pops in, five inches shorter than Kat, his crinkly brown eyes merry in his freckled face. “We were playing hide-and-seek; it took me a while to figure out where she went,”he noted, putting his arm around Kat’s waist.

“I thought you’d never show up,” Kat scoffed. “I was about to get you a blonde cappuccino. Which is so far removed from coffee I might as well give you chocolate milk.”

“Hey, I like chocolate milk!” Ian protested.

Amarel, their* white-blond hair braided neatly down their back, sits down across from me, smiling with dimples showing. “Lauren,” they say, head propped on knuckles, china blue eyes focused on me, “Tell me about your writing.”

I had forgotten that Amarel was in training to be a social worker. “I’ve been struggling for a while. I’m demoralized because I can’t seem to get anyone to read my stuff.”

“You could,” they said, flexing their long fingers as their hands steepled, “write as if they are reading. And then maybe they will find you. Your words deserve to be heard.”

Maybe Amarel is right — maybe I need to write for my potential audience rather than mourning the lack of hits on this blog or on Wattpad. Moreso, maybe I need to write for Amarel, Grzegorz, Kat, and Ian. And all my other quirky characters.

*************

* Amarel is genderqueer, having been born with male and female genitals. This is a preferred gender pronoun form for them.

Dusting myself off and trying again

It looks like I’m going to subject myself to another round of the Kindle Scout campaign process.

I’m just finishing one more edit of the book Voyageurs for a possible Kindle Scout campaign. It, like Gaia’s Hands (which, with fewer than 15 days left, will not make the cut for publication), is a standalone book for the moment. Voyageurs doesn’t happen in the same space as the Archetype series, so it wouldn’t break up a series (which would make it unattractive to an agent).

Voyageurs is very different than Gaia’s Hands. Where Gaia’s Hands is a delicate, pastoral slice of magical realism, Voyageurs features the sardonic daredevil Kat Pleskovich and the bookish Ian Akimoto from the disastrous ecological future called The Chaos. What begins as a string of suspicious deaths among the Travellers, or time-jumpers, becomes the uncovering of a plot to destroy the world.

Although it would be easy to dismiss this book as a time traveller romance, I’ve skewed things a little too much to use that label comfortably. Present-day Kat’s streetwise manner and her prickliness make her anything but the girl who needs a big man to protect her. Ian from the future, frail and bookish, has more empathy but a tendency to try to ingratiate himself to Kat. Their mentor, Berkeley, is a frustratingly droll time historian who revels in the Socratic Method. The bad guys? You’ll have to read the book.

I would call this book a crossover — soft SF with a touch of mystery and a relationship that helps pull things together.

If you have any ideas about the timing of the book campaign, please let me know.

Thank you for sticking with me!