Going Home, Again - The Synopsis

Going Home, Again is the story of Emily Ann Franklin, a middle school history teacher from Salisbury Maryland. Emily is dating a guy named Jake, a computer tech at PRMC. She has two best friends - Amy works at the Nabb Research Center and has almost finished her doctorate in Colonial history. Nat is a nurse at PRMC, and the one who introduced Emily and Jake.

Emily and Amy create this awesome colonial immersion program for middle and high school students in Wicomico County Maryland. They get to spend two weeks in the summer, living as Maryland settlers did, on the grounds of the Furnace Town Heritage Museum outside Snow Hill, Maryland. At the end of a terrific two weeks, a freak accident happens and Emily finds herself lost in the woods.... and soon discovers that the cabin isn't the only thing that's gone. Her whole life has been flipped upside down and shaken. When she stepped out of that cabin door, she stepped into 1733.

She's hired as an indentured servant for a local farmer named Luke, obviously an ancestor of her boyfriend Jake. She soon discovers ways that she can fit in, and learns to love not only the life she is living but the people around her. Before long, Emily and Luke are married and her memories of her life before walking out of that cabin are starting to fade.

Of course, things can't be easy in colonial Maryland, can they? Deaths, fires, and losses are commonplace and Emily lives through it all. Then there are trips, long and arduous compared to the twenty-first century, to spend time with Luke's relatives in Annapolis, to meet new friends in Williamsburg, to New York and Boston. In time, Emily learns that there are others like her, other time travelers. And she learns that she will go back to her own time. In fact, she could do it whenever she chooses. But the way to go back isn't easy and isn't reversible.

Will she choose to go back? Will she stay where she is? Is the return trip inevitable, and if so what will happen when she returns? Well, you'll have to read the book to find out!

Going Home, Again - the back story

Now that my first book is finished and for sale on Amazon and Kindle, I've been asked a few times where the story came from. Since this book has been long in the works, the answer is a little on the complicated side, but I'll give it a go anyway.

Many years ago, I spent some time in the National Guard. One year, we did our two weeks outside Boston. While there, I went into the city with a group of fellow soldiers and immediately fell in love. My inner history geek was in heaven. Soon after that I story started taking shape in my head. The general idea was a young woman, for some reason in period costume, mysteriously finds herself deposited in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

The story sat in my head for years, not really going anywhere and not really wanting to be written, until I met the love of my life (I know, I'm squishy) a couple years ago. I told him about it and he suggested some modifications. We spent a number of hours tossing it back and forth - move her to Delmarva so I can stage it where I am familiar, make her a history teacher so she won't be flummoxed by the time travel, figure out a way to prove that it really happened.

I guess you could say that the story grew legs, sitting in his backyard on summer evenings after we both got off work. She got her name, Emily, out there. She got her grandmother and her best friends Nat and Amy. The idea that she would fall in love with an ancestor of her boyfriend happened out there, too. I wasn't kidding in the book dedication when I said I couldn't have done this without my boyfriend.

The next thing that happened was receiving a gift - my Chromebook. The wonderful thing about a Chromebook is that everything is cloud-based by default. I could start writing and not worry about pesky things like backups. I started doing some research. I did a ton of reading on colonial Maryland, indentured servitude, colonial dress, colonial travel, typical diet on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the early 1700's. All of that information was at my fingertips - I could crawl through the Maryland Archives or spend half a day reading every last thing on the Colonial Williamsburg website. The Internet is an amazing research tool.

Even with all that, though, I still wasn't writing. I was afraid of it, quite honestly. What if the story didn't come out of me the right way? What if it wasn't good enough? Something else had to happen to give me a big push. And that something was NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It happens in November each year. You sign up and get all sorts of encouragement and suggestions to help you write 50,000 words in a thirty-day period. I signed up, and with the self-imposed pressure of a deadline, the book came flying out of me. It was an amazing process.

So I wrote a book. A book that lived on my Google drive, that no one but me would ever see, at least in theory. I thought it was pretty good, but there were some parts I wasn't in love with. It didn't matter, though. I had reached my goal. I had written a book.

A book that I just left there, doing nothing and going nowhere, until June third of this year (2012), when I got an email from NaNoWriMo telling me that as a winner, I could get five free copies of my book from CreateSpace, if I ordered them before June 30. It was like November all over again. I was on fire to revise. It took me about a week and a half to overhaul a couple chapters, check for things like consistent character names (some of the less-prominent characters got a little mixed up - I was writing in a hurry after all!) and correct some really obvious issues.

Next was submitting my book to see if it suited the format for CreateSpace. It did not (no surprise there) so I spent another couple days reformatting it, writing the dedication, writing the disclaimer, and designing a cover. I then sat myself down and read through it. I'm pretty sure there are still little errors here and there (I did edit my own book, after all) but I feel pretty good about it, in all.

Then it was the second submission, and a new cover that I feel is more representative of the story. And a second submission for formatting. Once that was approved, I got a chance to look at an electronic proof of the book (with a bit of SQUEEing). I approved the proof and ordered my copies and then there it was - I could sell it on Amazon and Kindle for free. Well, of course I will, thank you very much.

It's amazing how the "I could see my book in print how cool is that" morphed into "I have actually sold books!"