Time travel to me in the first instance means Sandra Hill. Then there’s Lyn Kurland and Linda Lael Miller. Sandra is the doyenne of time travel. With her Cajun and the Viking series, all alpha males, all pigheaded and every single one brought to their knees begging for love from a feisty woman. Humour is Ms. Hill’s trademark. Imagine going back to the days of sumptuous pastries and high fat everything for a wafer thin model bent on keeping her figure.

You’re a 21st century woman who has decided to stay in the past with the man you love, and then you see two riders coming towards your homestead. They’re wearing modern army uniforms but it’s only the 1800s. Someone else has come back in time too. This was the lead for Hill’s book "Desperado".

Each character is tied to their own time; each has to cope in another. Let’s look at what they have to deal with when bringing a character forward.

Imagine a ferocious Viking warrior turning up in your lounge, breaking up the furniture so he could have some heat, when heck all he had to do is turn on a switch for the central heating.

He’s never seen running water from a tap and it’s instantly HOT! He’s used to finding a taper to light a candle, not a switch on a wall and when he does find it, he’s having as much fun as a two year old flicking the switch on and off until it drives you nuts. Then, of course, there’s the toilet. No squatting in the bushes, here. But watch it, your privates might get washed away. Yes, the new world for your ancient character is full of laughs, but also noise - TV, radio, cars, planes, music, computers, noise-noise-noise. Where is the silence of the night, the clear sky unpolluted by man and machine? Gone - if he stays in the future. Can he cope in the future?

Then, of course, there’s the travel back in time. What do you do if you get sick? People died in those days of a cold. There’s no vaccinations, no antibiotics and heck if you’ve dallied too long and get preggers there isn’t any hospital more than likely and ... well, I don’t want to go there, because I don’t know anything about having babies any way. Sounds painful.

And, of course, there’s the transport problem. You can’t get on a bus, traveling say from York to London takes weeks not hours - and you’ll get a painful butt riding if you haven’t been on a horse before. Then, of course, you might be stuck in the lower classes and they didn’t have horses - they couldn’t afford them. Owning a horse was in fact a luxury had by few, so more than likely you’ll be walking.

Then there’s language. They spoke an ancient form of Hebrew in Judea in those days, quite different from today. So, how is your hero or heroine going to understand the language? In "Woman of Valor", Samantha didn’t have a clue, but the hero did. He was an archaeologist, had studied ancient languages, and it had been hinted at earlier in the book. So I covered any questions of language difficulties with that.

You’ve got to work out what would be the problems your character will have if they go back in time: language, clothing, food, transport, to name a few, and work in ways to counter these obstacles. You can see you can have quite a bit of fun with time travel - backward and forwards, but there’s risk going back in particular.

Why Time Travel -2 (Continue)