A Theft in Time: Timedetectors ll

A Theft in Time: Timedetectors ll  (1997) Post 358, is the sequel to 1995's Timedetectors. A year has passed since Tom and Coxie's adventure with Lizba the time traveller and her enemy, Palmer.  In that story, Tom got shot with a sol-shot, which caused temporary paralysis. He recovered and all was well... for a while. Then he started feeling ill and weak, and stopped growing. With doctors uncertain about what has caused his illness, he is steadily growing worse when he visits Dr Pennyfather to try to discover what happened to the skull from the first book. This leads to an encounter with Coxie, who is now bigger and stronger than Tom, and happily settled with his mother, stepfather, baby sister and his pet cockatoo. The meeting is uneasy, but then they meet a timetraveller in the mall... soon the race is on to find a cure for Tom and to prevent Lizba's legacy from getting into the wrong hands.

In this story, we introduced two time police and named them James and Maria, after our son and daughter (it's her second name). We also had some fun with cockatoo DNA. This story, as sequels often do, arose from a strand in the story that we hadn;t really noticed until we needed it. Writers' serendipity!

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. She runs http://www.affordablemanuscriptassessments.com and Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist.  isn't an encyclopaedia of fantasy creatures as it first appears. Instead, it's a collection of character drawings and paintings with written descriptions. The artist and I treated the book more or less as we might have treated animal portraits or pictures of famous people of the past, giving each one a personality and a place in the general scheme of things. I loved working on this collection, because dreaming up characters and world-building with them is one of my favourite things to do.