How did you meet your character, Charlie Lamp?
As a high school English teacher, I have had the pleasure of teaching many inspiring young women. Charlie was an amalgamation of the many different young people I have met over the years. I deliberately gave her a country background, but with the added element of boarding. This is where kids from rural areas come down to the city and ‘board’, so that the can attend high school.
It was important for me to have a heroine with this background as I wanted a young person who could deal with anything narratively, I planned to throw at her. Due to living in the bush, many of the boarders knew how to change a tire for instance as there is no RAA Roadside Assistance Service where they live. They often also knew how to ride a horse, shoot a gun, and shear sheep. City kids tend not to have these skills as they have no need for them, and for Charlie to be a realistic heroine, she needed to come from a rural area in South Australia like Currency Creek.
Where did you get the inspiration for the Tempus Imperium watch? Did the story start with the watch?
The story started with the character of Charlie and her relationship with her grandmother, rather than the watch. The watch or the Tempus Imperium as I call it, was a device that the plot required to enable time travel. I didn’t want a time machine like a Tardis, rather I preferred something more incognito. After much brainstorming, I hit on the idea of a watch with a suitable Latin name of some gravitas in the Tempus Imperium.
I’ve always loved the mechanics of watches, especially the ones where the dials are visible, so I spent a lot of time researching different watches and their various functions. I was especially taken with the fact that the dials on a watch face are referred to as complications. For some reason, I found that quite amusing when thinking about time.
To come up with the design I collected multiple images of watches, and then drew a fairly detailed diagram in a notebook of what the watch looked like. This helped me ensure that it was consistently described throughout the entire novel.
What did you have to do to ensure the time travel scenes didn't get mixed up? Did you make some sort of plan?
To ensure that the time travel scenes did not get mixed up, and also to avoid any unintentional paradoxes, I created a very elaborate timeline. Boringly, I used Excel for this, but it gave me the space to plot out historical events as well as the dystopia of the Fulcrum. I could also map the life spans of certain characters against like Penny, Charlie’s grandmother.
You're a poet, so was it a natural shift to write prose in a poetic way? Or more difficult?
The hardest challenge I found when writing prose, was not to get too bogged down in poetic description. The nature of a YA novel is that it needs narrative momentum to sustain the interest of its demanding adolescent readership. I tried to be judicious in my use of imagery, where I often used it create atmosphere, especially in the scenes with the syneghasts.
Grandparents and grandchildren. Why do you think it's important that they bond?
Growing up, I had a wonderful great-grandmother and grandmother, who both choose to spend time with myself and my siblings. These days I see a similar strong bond forming between my own children and their grandparents. I think it’s important for children to grow up hearing their family stories and learning about the past. It’s what makes us who we are, and that’s why the central relationship of my novel is that of Charlie and her grandmother.