Time And Tyra Again came out of my desire to straighten up the rules and science in the series so that everything was consistent and made sense. It was also inspired by a personal peeve of mine.
I have always enjoyed Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, and one of my favourites is North by Northwest. It is considered a classic suspense movie, and a standard most other suspense stories aspire to.
Only, the set up of the story bugs the hell out of me. The hero, Roger Thornhill, just happens to put his hand in the air when the bad guys are watching to see who responds to the PA announcement calling for George Kaplan, which marks him and kicks the rest of the chase story into gear.
In other words, the entire melodramatic story rests upon a single, unlikely coincidence. The remainder of the story more than makes up for the poor start, but in my mind, it is a flaw that weakens the overall story.
So you can imagine my horror when I realized that Kiss Across Time, the very first book in this series, also relied upon a most unlikely chance to get the story properly rolling.
The odds against Brody picking Taylor out of a crowd of 15,000 death metal fans were far too high. He didn’t know who she was and, as later stories established, he was waiting for a mysterious Tyra to arrive in his life, and had been for nearly a thousand years.
Once I found the flaw, I couldn’t leave it alone. How could I “fix” the problem, when the story was out there already? I could rewrite the story and republish, but to my mind, that’s cheating.
Besides, if I forced myself to abide by the laws and story events already published, then the solution—when I found it—was likely to be highly creative and different.
It took some serious brain sweat to come up with the solution, but once I had it, it clicked into place as being perfectly obvious and simple. Brody did know who she was because…well, I’ll let you find out by reading Time And Tyra Again, which not only removed that annoying coincidence, but also reunited two of my favourite characters in the series, way back in the past, which was another open story loop I wanted to close.
Time and Tyra Again was published in March 2017.