Guest Post: Time Between Us by Tamara Ireland Stone

Please give a warm welcome to Tamara Ireland Stone, author of Time Between Us (Hyperion October 9, 2012). She’s here today to tell us a little bit about her debut and explain her rules for time travel. Time Between Us is one of my favorite reads of 2012, and I’m thrilled to be part of its blog tour organized by Authors on the Web!

Time Between Us and the Rules of Time Travel

by Tamara Ireland Stone

Time Between Us is a time travel story, but it’s more of a character-driven, contemporary romance than a sci-fi novel.

Bennett Cooper has the ability to travel through space and time, a talent he uses to see concerts and rock climb all over the world. But then he meets Anna Greene. He can give her the adventure of a lifetime, but he’s also going to have to test his rules if he wants to stay with her. There’s a lot at stake when you find yourself falling in love with a girl who lives seventeen years in your past.

My primary goal for Bennett’s rules: Keep them simple. I wanted readers to understand what he could do, and then lose themselves in a story about two people who never should have met, but accidentally find each other and fall in love. Bennett’s unique abilities are at the center of the challenges they face—and they provide a bunch of fun plot twists—but it was important to me to deliver a good balance and not weigh the story down in time travel rules and details.

In Time Between Us, Bennett is still figuring out some of these rules, but I know them well. It was my job to set them up, stick to them like glue, and leave it to him to push their limits:

1. Bennett can only travel within his lifetime.
Early in the development of this story, I decided that Bennett’s time travel would be restricted to his lifetime: His birthday—March 6, 1995—to the present day. That gave me lots of interesting avenues to explore, while allowing me to keep the story contemporary. He doesn’t steal future technology or battle dinosaurs.

2. Bennett can’t stay in another time.
In my construct for time travel, time has a way of “righting itself” when things get out of whack. If Bennett spends too long outside his present day, he eventually gets knocked back where he belongs. This is a big challenge when you’re from 2012 and falling for a girl who lives in 1995.

3. Bennett doesn’t believe he should change things.
Many time travel books and movies explore the question of whether or not history is changeable or set in stone. I went into this story with more of a Back to the Future perspective: events in the past can be changed. Rather easily, in fact. But Bennett believes that messing around with them could have disastrous consequences.

Bennett makes little changes here and there—mostly because he’s a seventeen-year-old guy and it’s hard to resist a good “do-over”—but he avoids the big stuff. Which is why this rule will be tested the most.

4. Bennett can take people with him.
Have you ever had a first date with a person who could hold your hands and take you anywhere in the world you wanted to go at the speed of thought? Anna has.

Creating a solid structure and a set of rules around Bennett’s time travel ability helped me keep the parameters intact, but that’s not to say it’s been easy. I’ve paid close attention to every single detail along the way, and I have put together timelines and calendars, maps and sketches, and files and files of research on time travel theory. And since writing about something so complex can lead to mistakes, I’ve relied on my husband and editor to talk through some of the trickier scenarios with me. They are brilliant time travel logic partners.

I’ve loved geeking out on time travel, and forcing myself to figure out how to sort out every puzzle I’ve come up with. I hope I’ve made the story fun and the time travel interesting. If you let out an audible, “Whoa” as you’re reading, I’ve achieved what I was going for.

Many thanks to Tamara for stopping by today! Be sure to check out my 5 bean review of Time Between Us and enter to win my ARC (ends 10/21/12)!