"Imagine, if you will, the ability to live your life a second time. Would you take that risk, knowing you might end up in a world that looked vastly different from our technology-riddled world of today?"
In my first trilogy, I dove into not only a fountain of youth but also the questions that have baffled humans for centuries. I tapped into the hopes and fears of three troubled souls who still had dreams and ambitions. I used time travel and a healing spring to explore possibilities that both intimidated and encouraged. I gave the Carpenters a second chance.
I loved writing this series, where Bill, Paul, and Annie, senior citizens from Portland, Oregon, become 23-, 17-, and 14-year-olds and begin new lives in Oakland, California. I particularly loved the trilogy's many challenges, including writing credibly about siblings from 2022 who bring old minds and young bodies to the early twentieth century.
As a Baby Boomer, I could relate to many of the experiences Bill, Paul, and Annie carried through the series like excess baggage. I could imagine their frustrations and concerns as they tried to adapt to an era of limited communications, rigid social customs, shoddy safety standards, and diseases that doctors had not yet conquered. But I could also picture the possibilities. I could imagine the thrill and excitement of living life a second time and getting a lot of things right.
When creating the series, I researched not only real people, places, and things but also fictional ones. I spent weeks learning about the fabled Fountain of Youth, a restorative spring once believed to bubble on Bahamian island of Bimini. I put the fountain in Mexico. Inspired by the sight of the Sierra de la Laguna range, which I discovered on a trip to Cabo San Lucas, I gave the Carpenters something closer to home.
When I wrote the trilogy in 2022 and 2023, I did so from the perspective of a man who had just turned sixty and lost his mother. Like the Carpenters, I could understand longing, hopes, fears, regrets, and the unstoppable passage of time. I could easily place myself in the shoes of three very different characters who were ready for a life change.
With a few spoilers, here is a look at a trilogy that is as much a sentimental journey through the first half of the twentieth century as it is collection of books. Second Chance is by far my favorite series.
THE FOUNTAIN (2022): If my book collection had a soul, it would be the reflective tome I published on August 14, 2022. No other novel asks as many big questions or asks them as often as The Fountain.
Then Bill, a retired professor, learns that the Fountain of Youth, his obsession for decades, may be more than a myth. Within weeks, he and the others begin a fantastic journey that leads to 1905, the San Francisco Bay Area, and a never-ending stream of challenges and moral dilemmas. Once in Oakland, the Carpenters must decide how much, if anything, to tell friends and loved ones about an earthquake that will claim 3,000 lives. They confront the curse of time travel.
In The Fountain, I describe not only the joys of living life a second time but also the sorrows. I remind Bill, Paul, and Annie that immortality, even limited immortality, sometimes comes with a steep price.
I also describe a contradictory world that is as stylish and elegant as it is unprincipled and crude. I give readers a 1905 taste of San Francisco, Baja California, and even Portland, which hosted the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, the West Coast's first world's fair.
As mentioned above, one of the challenges (and joys) of drawing the siblings was navigating their transition from old people to young. Bill is a young man who can marry again and have children. Paul has healthy lungs and can play sports. Annie can move. Crippled in a car accident in her first run through life, she can now walk, run, and dance.
The Carpenters can also find work, make friends, and explore their potential, which they do at Oakland Preparatory Academy. They cross paths with Principal Edward Miller, literature teacher Cassie Lee, and graduating seniors Andy Lee and Pauline Wagner. They become intertwined with people they were never supposed to meet.
Though I wrote The Fountain around these relationships, I did not do so at the expense of action. As I did in The Fire, September Sky, River Rising, and my other "disaster" novels, I gave readers the spectacle they wanted. I put America's greatest earthquake on a plate.
Favorite Quote: In Chapter 78, Cassie Lee experiences the 1906 earthquake from the balcony of her San Francisco row house.
Cassie looked with awe as more animals streamed out of buildings and raced toward the bay with reckless abandon. Then she looked with horror as distant structures started to sway and the ground began to rise. In the blink of an eye, a terrestrial wave, maybe twenty feet high, rose in the west and disrupted everything in its path. It crumpled buildings, buckled the street, and moved east like a tsunami. It hit a teacher with blunt force.
ANNIE'S APPLE (2023): When I originally conceived my twenty-second novel, I imagined something light and bouncy. I pictured Annie Carpenter taking a city by storm like Marlo Thomas in That Girl or Mary Tyler Moore in her eponymous sitcom. I wrote something else.
In the first few chapters, garment workers, victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, fling themselves out of windows or down elevator shafts. Andy Lee is shot at the start of the book and stabbed in the middle. A beloved new character goes down with the Titanic. Annie herself threatens to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Three romantic relationships end badly. Annie's mentor, a society editor, grieves her lover and their child decades after losing them. Bill and Cassie battle infertility. No one is spared.
If I had to write the book today, I would not change a thing. I believe each of the storylines was necessary to propel the narrative forward and illustrate the hardships of living in a deceptively tranquil age.
Annie's Apple is a treasure trove of contradictions. Annie, a witty young reporter, and new characters like Prudence Rusk frequently punctuate a somber novel with lightness and laughs. Hopes rise and fall like an ocean tide. Though the story moves between four countries, two continents, and an infamous ship, it largely stays put. It is the only one of my books that does not contain a single act of time travel.
Set against all this is my best love story. In Annie's Apple, I throw Paul Carpenter, an Army sergeant, into the arms of Shannon Taylor, a beautiful young housekeeper with secrets of her own. I introduce a character who adds intrigue and spark to an already complex plot.
Though Annie's Apple is a harrowing novel that puts Bill, Paul, and Annie through often brutal trials, it ends on a positive note. As author Heather L. Barksdale observed in her September 2023 review: "The ending is fitting for the rest of the tale — a little sad, a bit romantic, and hauntingly hopeful. It set the tone for the next book in the series."
One final note: The title of Annie's Apple is derived from the name of the novel's main protagonist and the Big Apple, the city she calls her own. My illustrator created the book's distinctive cover using a 1911 drawing by Charles Dana Gibson, a public-domain image generously provided by the Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs Division.
Favorite Quote: In Chapter 4, Bill Carpenter digests newspaper accounts of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 25, 1911.
People on the ninth floor had it worst. Unable to reach the roof or the lobby or the ladders that extended only to the sixth floor, they leapt to their deaths. Some jumped alone. Others jumped in groups. All tugged at the heartstrings of more than ten thousand witnesses in the vicinity. One young man helped three young women out of a window and gently dropped them to the street. Then he assisted a fourth, gave her a kiss, and escorted her to heaven. He answered horror with humanity.
DUTIES AND DREAMS (2023): I never tire of writing about war. In 15 years as an author, I have written about war or the advent of war many times. Seven of my novels are set against the backdrop of World War II, three against World War I, three against the American Revolution, and one against the Civil War. One book is set against two wars.
I loved writing this novel. I loved it, in part, because I was able to split timelines, feature a villain, reveal secrets, recycle beloved characters, and tell a story from several settings, including my native Pacific Northwest. I was able to put many of my favorite things on center stage and bring my first trilogy to a satisfying conclusion.
Though Duties and Dreams is a "war" book, it is so much more. It is a story of love, duty, and profound sacrifice, the kind that prompts serious questions and pushes comfortable people out of their comfort zones.
Three things drive this novel: a crippling war wound, a terminal illness, and two fountains that offer hope to the hopeless. They test marriages, add intrigue, and provide an unlikely means to a gratifying end.
When I wrote Duties and Dreams, I did more than create a thriller that spanned three generations and six countries. I tipped my hat to my childhood home, my father, and even my humble beginnings.
Much of the book is set in Western Washington, where I spent most of my adolescence. Fort Lewis, Tacoma, Puget Sound, and Mount Rainier National Park, an important setting in The Mine, get significant play.
Regarding the second matter, I dedicated Duties and Dreams to "Dad," my father, James Heldt. When I did, I did not realize that the acronym of the book's title was, fittingly, "DAD." So I ended up paying an extra tribute to a humble man who died at age 93 last February.
As for me, I did something only authors can do. When I realized the Carpenter saga would end in 1961, I did more than pick a random date. I picked a special one. I ended Duties and Dreams and the Second Chance series on December 30, 1961, the day I was born.
Favorite Quote: In Chapter 27, Nazi soldiers chase sabotage suspect Emilie Perot into a cave and push her off the fence of indecision.
Then the Nazis pushed her off it. When they flooded the cave and raced toward the darkening room, they reminded a prospective time traveler that there were worse ways to die than to dissolve in a vat of acid. Emilie glanced down at the once luminescent pool as it grew darker and stiller and dropped nearly a meter. She gathered her courage and stared danger in the face. She did what she had done for years. Then she did something else. The confirmed agnostic said a quick prayer and made the sign of the cross. She said hello to a childhood friend and jumped into a dark abyss. She took the leap of her life.
I published Duties and Dreams weeks before I retired and collected my first Social Security check. Though I was ready to adopt a slower pace and write only stand-alone novels, I did not. I jumped into a trilogy I had wanted to write for several years. Next: The Stone Shed series.
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