Your story begins in the future or the past or the present and then jumps to another time. The character (or characters) remains the same while experience some sort of jump in time. The general consensus, particularly for those jumping into the past, is that one should not change historical events as it might, and will, affect the present and the future times. Quite the conundrum. And very difficult to pull off effectively.

My first attempt in time travel, “Queen Mary’s Daughter”, was a challenge, but I was able to pull it off by labeling each new chapter with a time and date stamp to identify where the character (or characters) were. I also used italics for one time period, to accentuate the fact that it was a different time period. Most of my readers and reviewers followed the flow of the time travel jumps, which I had one of the characters describe as “puddle jumping”, but one reviewer, in particular, was adamant that I had it all wrong. She wrote: “I am the wife of a physicist and we have discussed time travel and how it could/would work many times. That element was never fully explained in this book – how Mary Elizabeth [the protagonist] and nearly everyone she ever met was able to jump to the past and future at will.”

I don’t think I was that flamboyant with my “puddle jumping”, but it did cause me to wonder if a physicist’s detailed perspective of how time travel works is really necessary. My thoughts? No. Reviewing in my mind the books and movies I’ve read and watched that include time travel, I don’t think there was ever an explanation of how it happened. It just did. The important thing was that there was consistency between the times and the events and that things were only changed at the discretion of the author and for the purpose of furthering the plot. My intent with “Queen Mary’s Daughter” was to point out that if there had been a completely different historical timeline, Scotland might have continued to be a free and powerful nation in its own right well into the future.

Like any other book, it’s important to keep the facts (historical facts and altered historical facts) clear and consistent. To maintain a sense of what’s happened or is happening and to make sure I don’t suddenly change the events, I keep a storyboard going, adding details as the plot develops. When I launched into the sequel of “Queen Mary’s Daughter”, I faced another set of variables that had to maintain the events and details from the first book. “King Henry’s Choice”, primarily set a couple of centuries later (with jumps in time both to the past and into the future), I had to not only keep the character list from “Queen Mary’s Daughter” consistent, but also the events (both historical and altered). Since I was, in effect, creating multiple new time warp alternate realities, things changed as much as they remained the same. I continued with the plan from the first book, inserting chapter headings to identify time and location, as well as using the italics to identify a specific time. It seemed to work. But, I knew “King Henry’s Choice” would be the last book in the series as too many things were changing and the plots, both the main plots and the secondary plots, were becoming too complex and convoluted. I knew another book would not only throw the reader but myself as well.

There is another conundrum in writing time travel stories: a character meeting themselves in another time. It’s been argued that two of the same person cannot exist in the same time continuum, but has it been proven that this is the case? It’s also been argued that the two same people cannot be at the same time or place for a lengthy period of time or one will fade away (evaporate?). Also, not proven. Both Mary Elizabeth, in “Queen Mary’s Daughter”, and King Henry, in “King Henry’s Choice”, visited themselves at different stages of their lives. It added a whole new complex scenario as one Mary Elizabeth, or one King Henry, communicated with the other at a different age.

Time travel isn’t easy to write. The possibilities of what the writer can do with ‘time’ are endless. With “Queen Mary’s Daughter” and “King Henry’s Choice”, I wanted to present a whole new reality, one in which Scotland remained free and independent, as well as a powerful country in its own right. It’s the Scottish blood in me, I guess. I was able to manipulate historical facts and re-invent, so to speak, the Scottish (and the English) history already well recorded. By keeping my notes and storyboard current, I managed to maintain my own equilibrium in this multi-dimensional, time warp continuum. To put it simply, it was fun to write and I’m pleased with the results.