A Frenchman and a F-Bomb

Several of you tweeted back that, yes, you wanted to see a photo of the infamous la Salle. I aim to please. Drum roll for Friday picture show...

I realized as I cropped the photo of this poor, unsuspecting man (that I did not snap, incidentally) that he bears an uncanny resemblance to Bret Scallions of I-dropped-the-F-bomb-at-a-Jenna-and-Barbara-Bush-inauguration-party-and-inspired-L.A.'s-first-romance-hero fame.

So there you have it. Crucify me for my taste.

As for time travel news, I have two nuggets. Dav Pilkey's enormously popular children's books that nurture male grossness, the Adventures of Captain Underpants series, have spawned The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future, a graphic novel from Scholastic's Blue Sky Press imprint. Huge, ginormous sales await. Score one for time travel. Also in temporal realms this week, Disney and Bedrock Studios announced a cooperative effort to send Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time into movie production. Let's home they don't go all Little Mermaid and tank its awesomeness.

That's all I have. Except this...(thank you, laughingwolf)

and this...Vortex-ers are the best. You know me so well. We're up to fifty-eight subscribers and counting! Tell your friends about the upcoming Blog Carnival on March 31st and let's see if we can't get that number to 100. Serious time travel partying when that happens.

Have a phenomenal weekend, everyone.

Today's random question: If you could have a remote control for anything, what would you choose?

Happy Little Time Travel Romances

So it's not any news that directly pertains to my novels, but it is further proof the time travel romance sub-genre is alive and well and oh, so beauuuutiful.

The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance, edited by London's Murder One bookstore manager Trisha Telep, is a collection of twenty five time travel short stories from some of the romance industry's heavy hitters: Nina Bangs, Jude Devereaux, Sandra Hill, Linda Howard, Lynn Kurland, Karen Marie Moning and many more.

This collection includes stories set in Medieval Scotland, sixteenth century England, the American Wild West, the present day and, of course, the future. It's set to release in the UK in October, the US in December, but it's available for pre-order now with Amazon. Could the cover art gods have been any kinder? Yum. Or maybe he just looks that much better when placed aside Bob Ross.

If you can't wait until the fall to get your hands on a great time travel romance, here's a list of fairly recent time travel romances broken down into sub-sub-genre. And I'm slowly making my way through this blogger's list because he had some time travel novels that I'd not heard of that sound amazing.

Is this sub-genre on the upswing? A girl can hope.

The Time Machine - Week of June 23, 2008

I'm back to the whole time-travel-market-is-soft thing. I present further proof it is not:

Exhibit A:
Spike Lee has signed on to direct Time Traveler, a movie based on Ronald Mallett's memoir Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality. The memoir tells the tale of a young African-American male raised in poverty, his journey to becoming a distinguished theoretical physicist, and his obsession to travel back in time to save the father he lost when he was ten years old.

Lee says, "It's a fantastic story on many levels and (also) a father and son saga of love and loss."

Exhibit B:
Universal Pictures has a time travel thriller in the works called The Archive. David Auburn, who scripted The Lake House for Warner Brothers, will join forces with Walk the Line director James Mangold.

Lastly, I found this fascinating short documentary by Jay Cheel called Obsessed and Scientific. In it, the world-renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku offers a very accessible interpretation of time travel. We also meet Larry Habner, an entertainment lawyer who represents the family of John Titor, an alleged time traveler from the year 2036, and Rob Niosi, a man obsessed with recreating a full-scale replica of H.G. Well's time machine. It's a fantastic look at the bizarre crossroads between real scientific theory and science fiction. (run time: 25 min.)

Riding the Wave

A publishing industry professional told me last summer the time travel market was "soft." This was before Journeyman, well into the throwes of Lost and Heroes's successful record, and a breath before the current run of television and movie releases involving time travel. With the exception of about ten years ago, circa Quantum Leap-era, I can't recall a more fertile time for the topic, nor a time where the subject has become so mainstream. What about this media saturation is "soft"?

Does the book industry follow trends or create them? Sure, the Time Traveler's Wife came out in 2004 as a little-known literary novel. With no way to know it would be made into a major motion picture, I can't help but think the merit of the novel was based purely on Audrey Niffenegger's brilliant prose instead of the plot device usually relegated to the part of the bookstore where creepy men in Member's Only jackets browse.

By the time the publishing industry catches up with the "time thriller" trend, will readers and audiences be firmly in the been-there, done-that arena?

Although the upcoming movie "Jumper" relies more heavily on the idea of teleportation--in itself time travel--it puts the marriage of paranormal and thriller at the forefront of high-profile media. Does this mean we're reaching the saturation point? The pinnacle of the trend?

My first novel was a fictional YA novel set aboard the Titanic. When I began researching it, it was an obscure topic that fascinated a small group of my students to the point where I couldn't find enough non-fiction books to satiate their curiosity. The last surviors were dying. Unbenownst to me, James Cameron was pouring a small Hollywood fortune into deep-sea expeditions that would eventually become the pinnacle of this trend. The sheer magnitude and success of his film saturated the market and made publishers reluctant to offer a contract to anything seen as a copycat.

Twice now, I've been a year or more ahead of a trend and watched other projects rise to the top, while publishing houses wait for a "sure thing". A time-tested subgenre that will guarantee sales, but leave them scrambling behind the trends of the mass media. Editors are reluctant to take chances, as one misstep could cost them their job. They walk a tightrope between fresh and proven, sales and art, where timing becomes everything.

If only they had the time-travel abilities of the stories they're so reluctant to stand behind.

What trend waves have you ridden in your work?