Spring is pretty subtle here at the beach in Southern California. It comes earlier than in other places in the country. Nights are still cool, sometimes as low as the high forties. But days begin to inch up to the upper sixties from the low sixties, and sometimes, like today in March, we even flirt with seventy. Spring is always a promise. That’s true even when the winters aren’t that harsh. You can feel the promise in the air and it’s exciting. We start… to expect change.

In TWIST IN TIME, it’s that electric expectation that begins to take hold of my hero and heroine. They don’t know what’s coming but something sure is, and it’s exciting and frightening and it starts feeling inevitable. It’s going to change them and their relationship with each other and their relationship with the world, forever.

I set TWIST IN TIME in March in San Francisco (near where I grew up, and always one of my favorite cities) unconsciously, but March is the perfect time. The promise of spring is faint. But the world starts whispering to you that everything is about to change.

Change is just what shy bookseller Lucy Rossano wants in her life. Her scientist father has passed on. She has her business dealing in rare books and a friend, Brad, a physicist at the Super Collider lab who knew her father and seems like a connection to him. But…something is missing, until a woman named Frankie (from TIME FOR ETERNITY) gives her a book by Leonardo DaVinci that describes his effort to build a time machine. The book says he was successful. That’s crazy. But when Brad confides that his top secret project at the lab aims to power a strange medieval machine whose purpose is a mystery, Lucy knows what that machine was designed to do. An unbelievable coincidence, right?

It feels inevitable to Lucy that she will use Leonardo’s machine and use it she does, to go back to a time when the world was full of promise and magic. She lands in the middle of a fierce Dark Age battle. When a warrior falls against her as she powers up the machine to escape, she finds herself saddled with a wounded Viking from 912 A.D. in modern day San Francisco. Worse, Brad and his shadowy government agency sponsors are now after the machine that only she can use, and her Viking, Galen Valgarssen. On the run, she and Galen must cross the language barrier and find a way to escape the relentless pursuit of those who would use the machine to change time for their personal gain. Is it just a coincidence that she feels an overwhelming attraction to the man she happened to bring back with her?

Here’s a little excerpt from A TWIST IN TIME:

“The lights in the boat’s cabin went out with a fizzle leaving only the clear, pale moonlight streaming in through the ports. Lucy couldn’t get her breath. She was hurtling toward something that had been growing inside her, around her. It felt like destiny. She could refuse it. She had a choice. But she was standing on a precipice and everything would soon be very wrong if she made the wrong choice right here, right now.

Conflagration. And she knew what she must do. It wasn’t what she’d thought.
She held out a hand. “Let’s go on deck.”

He looked alarmed, confused.

“You know it’s right.” She did. All would be well if they could but see the moon.
A taut, invisible line stretched between them. She saw him struggle. She smiled, hand still extended. He closed his eyes, took a breath.

“I fight no more,” he whispered, and took her hand.

She opened the hatch. They climbed to the deck, the dog wriggling out ahead of them. The moon was rising over the bay to the east. It had cleared the horizon, golden from the pollution in the air. It shone in eerie serenity. This moon had shone over Galen’s time too.

He came up behind her. “What month is it?” he whispered, his voice hoarse.

She shivered, only half from cold. “We call it March. Third month.”

“What day? What day?”

She had to think. “Twenty-first.” She held up fingers.

He rolled his head as though in pain. “Ostara’s day. Change of season.”

“The… the vernal equinox…”

“Ja. Ja. Day same long as night.” His voice held half wonder, half fear.

The beginning of spring. The day that signaled a change in the world as it quickened toward the plenty of summer. “Who… who is Ostara?” she asked.

He seemed most agitated. “Norse goddess of…” He went to Latin, “fecundity. Like Saxon Eostre,” he added. “Very mighty day.”

So powerful Christian priests borrowed it for the celebration of Christ’s resurrection to spread their faith among the pagans. Druids celebrated the first day of spring, too, didn’t they? But the moon wasn’t always full exactly on the 20th or 21st of March. That must be pretty rare….

She turned to him under the full moon of the vernal equinox and knew in her bones and her belly that something special was supposed to happen here, something bigger than her, even bigger her and Galen together. The full moon, the tides, the earth’s axis that rotated through space, all those could be explained. But in their confluence, they became something more, a promise of some kind. She ached for completion and she knew what would complete her. The whole world was telling her.
God, she sounded like a loon, even to herself. The universe was not talking to her. Next she’d start believing in astrology and she’d open up a shop that sold crystals and incense.

But Galen was here, big and real in the cold March air of the vernal equinox under a full moon. This was real. And what they were about to do together was right.”

So here we are in March, with the faint promise of spring in the air as the world turns toward summer. It seems a gigantic coincidence that TWIST OF TIME was released in March.

Or maybe not.

I will be giving away a signed copy of Twist in Time and a box of Godiva Chocolate to someone who comments on this blog.