If you are following along with this new novel, The next installment of Golden Threads is now available here: Chapter 3: Hiding.
I am having a ton of fun writing this tale about a young girl on the verge of becoming a witch, and the other witches who’ve decided to save her and her brother’s life. This magical adventure/romance across time is very different from the other novel that I’m close to finishing, which is more along the lines of Jody Picoult’s or Barbara Delinsky‘s novels.
Usually I prefer to read fairly serious stuff. You can see that from the books I have reviewed on this site. Right now I am reading Incendiary, by Chris Cleave, which promises to turn out just as emotionally rich and tough as his other novel, Little Bee. However, this winter I got hooked on two romantic and magical series with time travel.
The first, A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness, was recommended by a friend, who loaned it to me. I could hardly put it down. I loved all of the fantasy, the fact that it was placed in Oxford, the tidbits about scholars lives, and so on. The forbidden romance reminded me of stories about the first black-white marriages in the United States. I read the second in the series, Shadow of Night, and loved all of the time travel, plus the wonderful details that elaborate the history and really put one right there, struggling to don a dress and deal with servants.
The second series was something I started on because I had an auto accident and my energy levels and mental clarity were low for awhile. I wanted something light. probably reading Deborah Harkness inspired me to read Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon, and all was lost. I zoomed through her seven novels (and they are almost all over a thousand pages). My mind just couldn’t let go of all the possibilities of all the things that could go wrong when one goes back and forth in time. I also enjoyed the details about the past that fill these novels. The prose isn’t quite as lovely as in A Discovery of Witches, but the story (or, really, stories, as each adventure could be thought of as a short story, but with the same characters returning over and over) is at least as captivating.
I have always loved the idea of time-travel, and often have fantasized about what it would be like to suddenly find myself in another time. What would happen? How would I figure out how to fit in? What if I were part of a scientific expedition to go into the future or the past? Would we be able to survive? Could we communicate? And then, what about adding some magic? Somehow, thinking about all this, and wanting to write something easy, out popped the first chapter, the second chapter, and now the concept of an entire novel. I hope that you’ll enjoy it as it appears on these pages.