A nod to Valentine's Day

In the minds of many, time travel and romance go hand in hand. They are like the peanut butter and jelly of literature and cinema.

Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, the gold standard of the genre, combines the two elements. So do Time and Again, Somewhere in Time, Timeline, and even 11/22/63, works written by men.

I have combined time travel and romance, to varying degrees, in each of my 26 books. Since publishing The Mine, my first novel, fourteen years ago this week, I have found it difficult to send a character through time without providing him or her with a suitable companion.

Even Silas Bain, my worst villain, finds romance. In The Refuge, he builds a relationship with Ellen Dale, a fetching heiress, when not causing mayhem in Hawaii in 1941. He displays his softer side.

I inject romance into my stories to make them more interesting and believable. When writing time travel, it is easy to portray characters as superheroes who defeat bad guys, conquer mountains, and change the world. It is more difficult to portray them as vulnerable human beings who simply want companionship or even a night on the town.

Then again, there lies the fun. If there is one thing I enjoy about writing time-travel romances, it is putting different fish in different ponds and watching them interact. It is creating scenes only possible in fiction.

In Indiana Belle, Cameron Coelho, a doctoral student from 2017, and Candice Bell, a society editor from 1925, visit the dystopian world of 2041. In Let Time Fly, Jake Maclean, a boy from 2024, dances with Rachel Ward, a girl from 1780, on American Bandstand in 1958. In Duties and Dreams, Paul Carpenter and Emilie Perot, old souls from different eras, are thrown together as young adults in 1918 France.

Like Joel Smith in The Mine, Kevin Johnson in The Fire, and characters in other books, they create a rich social life in worlds they were never supposed to see. They make the most of their circumstances.

Of course, many of my protagonists find more than dates and distractions on their travels. They find mates. More than twenty marry people they meet in the past. Others form serious attachments. All find at least a smidgen of romance as they traipse through time.

Expect my next protagonists, U.S. Army airmen, to do the same. Stationed in England in 1944 and 1945, they will no doubt find plenty to keep them occupied. I hope to tell their story by the end of the year.

In the meantime, I will continue to promote books that combine two of my favorite things. Happy Valentine's Day to one and all!

Image credit: Charles Dana Gibson's "The Greatest Game in the World — His Move" was first published in 1903. It is in the public domain.