The After Times by Christine Potter

Please Welcome Christine Potter author of The After Times

Christine Potter will be awarding $50 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

The After Times

by Christine Potter

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GENRE: YA Fantasy–Time Travel

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INTERVIEW:

1. How did you come up with ideas for your books?

I draw on my own life a bunch; I’ll admit that. My books tend to be set in the Hudson River Valley, my home. That in itself is a source of inspiration. I tend to write about the supernatural, and the Hudson Valley is one of the most haunted places in the US, I think. It’s not just Sleepy Hollow!  We have ancient graveyards, disused mansions, huge old trees, and a long, colorful autumn. It gets the juices going. Also, I write about teens, and that’s a world I like thinking about. I taught high schoolers. I love kids—the big energy, the loyalty to friends, the DRAMA. Adults can be pretty boring.

2. What would you want your readers to know about you?

That I’m not just churning it out. For me, writing is a high form of play. I have to love what I’m doing, or I won’t do it. I like books that put me in another world, so world-building is important to me; I can see the towns I set my books in. I can see the houses my characters live in. I know how long it would take them to walk to the train station. I know what the public high school looks like—and the snooty place the very rich kids go to. I used to teach writing in a public high school, and my workshops always put out a mini-lit mag at the end of the semester. One of my favorites had a cover picture of a Victorian lady with her arm up in the air and it was titled “What Does It Smell Like?” That was a question I asked my students a lot. I write in that kind of detail. I sure hope my books don’t stink. I like to believe they are…fragrant.

3. If you could be one of the characters from any of your books, who would it be and why?

I think I’d like to be my main character, Bean—but not in the early books. In the first three books, she’s a teenager and a college student. I love young Bean, but she feels almost like a daughter or a god kid to me. I’d like to be her when there’s a new lead young adult character in the last two books (Grace) and Bean has become an experienced time traveling Guide. She can accompany the younger characters on their trips to the past, and help them fight off time demons. She’s kind of a hip auntie; she doesn’t hover or get upset, and she lets the kids figure things out for themselves unless they are in crazy danger and need right-away help. Plus she’s an old-school feminist with a loving, properly respectful partner—a guy she’s been with since high school. I like her style. She’s definitely cooler than I am!

4. Do you belong to a critique group? If so, how does this help or hinder your writing?

I’m not currently in a critique group for fiction, although I’m also a poet, and there’s a little online forum I participate in. Having people cheer you along in any from of writing is important, because it is lonely work. When I first started writing novels, I sent them to other writers of my kind of fiction and asked them for help, so I had a kind of informal group. That was hugely important. These days, I have a pretty firm sense of where I’m heading with a story or a character, and it doesn’t feel necessary. But the Bean books wouldn’t exist without the amazing help I got at a week-long masterclass with Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club)  at Hedgebrook, a woman’s writing retreat on an island off Washington State. Fowler was the first eyes on the first book in the series, and if any of my books work, it’s because of her input. She gave me the courage to tear my first draft of Time Runs Away With Her (Bean One) to shreds and put it back together. That was when I really got to know my characters. When I get stuck, I still think of her advice.

5. Do you outline your books or just start writing?

Ah, the planner, vs. pants-er question!  I am totally Team Pants-er. I make it up as I go along. That’s because writing usually shows you what you are trying to say as you say it; you need the process for your characters to develop and your plot to form. In the case of The After Times (Bean Five), I knew I would have to do something with Grace and her long-lost bio mom, but I really didn’t know what it was when I started. The book is set during the beginning of the Covid epidemic, and Grace is a time-traveler to 2020 from 1962. Her mom, if alive still, would be in her 90’s. We all know the peril elders were in before there were vaccines and good treatments for Covid. What happened wouldn’t have revealed itself to me as believably if I had decided it at the outset of the book. I’m really proud of my conclusion. It was hard to write. And I’m really proud of how I concluded the whole series; the Bean Books end with The After Times. I couldn’t have gotten to what finally happens to Bean any other way than just putting in the time writing.

6. Do you have any hobbies and does the knowledge you’ve gained from these carry over into your characters or the plot of your books?

I have also been involved with music my whole life. I’ve played it, sung it, had bands, jammed, sung with my husband’s choral groups, and for a while, actually played a small carillon at a church in the Bronx—that’s right, tower bells. (I practiced on Saturday afternoons, and the whole neighborhood heard.). So music is a huge part of my books. The first three Bean books are set in the early seventies mostly, with time travel to the 1880’s and the 1940’s and 50’s. There’s a TON of good music to draw on there. Bean is a musician as a young woman, although she goes on to produce radio as an adult (I’ve done radio work). The Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, Fairport Convention, Simon and Garfunkel, Alex Chilton’s band Big Star—it’s all in there. The last two books are set in the twenty-first century, but two of my characters are vinyl collectors, so there is everything from David Bowie and Broadway original cast albums to Robyn Hitchcock, a long-time favorite singer/songwriter of my own. I needed to finally give him a shoutout. You should read my books with YouTube open somewhere nearby!

7. What is your favorite reality show?

This is embarrassing. The answer is not hip. When I watch TV, it’s usually to calm myself down at night. My books are full of demons and time travel and craziness. I’ve got these huge plot lines. So I like to watch really predictable home renovation shows. Actually, houses—especially old ones—are important in my books, and I live in a house that was built in 1740 myself. Show me someone pulling a wall down and finding some nineteenth century carpentry, or a lost stained-glass window, and I’m a happy camper. I’m a big Nicole Curtis fan. I’d watch The Maine Cabin Masters rehab a phone booth. I like those guys in Detroit on Bargain Block who reno the bungalows and sell them at fair prices, complete with vintage furniture, to first-time home owners. I should write about this, I imagine…

8. Do you have an all-time favorite book?

Everything comes back to A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle for me. That, and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Green Gable books, although I might like Emily of New Moon better. After that, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and believe it or not, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, both of which I taught for years, and read along with my students countless times.

9. Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like to write a series?

It was HARD! It took close to a decade of my life, beginning to now. Like I said before, I’m not just churning it out. I let my characters speak to me, and I write carefully. I’m always combing back over what I have already done, checking facts in previous books, checking DATES (so important in time-travel). The town of Stormkill is a real place for me. Amp, Claire, Bean, Zak, Gracie and Zoey are real people. I know them. I have lived there. I was not following some sort of plot-maker guide when I wrote these books; I pulled them up out of my heart. They say that fiction is a true lie. A series is a very, very long true lie. I have done some hard things in my life: getting my Masters while I was teaching, learning to mix sound for my husband’s choir during pandemic, teaching myself how to play TOWER BELLS, for Heaven’s sake. This was that kind of hard.

1o. Anything else?

You are reading these words in the chilly autumn. I am writing them to you on a sunny day in a vacation rental in Maine. The guy who rented us this place writes detective novels. I’m in his study, with a view of the Penobscot Bay. Life could be worse, although flogging a new book on vacation takes dedication!  Don’t cry for me; there is lobster in my future. I hope there is something you love in your future, and I really hope you like The After Times and the rest of The Bean Books!

BLURB:

Say you’re Gracie Ingraham, nerdy but happy high school senior. But you’re also a time-traveler from 1962 who got a bit lost and has been living in the 2000’s since 2018. That would be plenty without it now being 2020. Covid has just shut down the world. Your pandemic pod? Your BFF Zoey—and your ex-boyfriend, Dylan.

Dylan still lives to spin weird vinyl LP’s with your sort-of, kind-of Dad, Amp. So your quarantine hobby is going to have to be Being Mature About Stuff.

But then your time traveling kicks into high gear again.  And your long-lost brother and mom mix it up with a creepy, pyromaniacal force that is most likely demonic. How can love save the day when you can’t even go downtown without wearing a mask?

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EXCERPT:

We’d arrived at the first of the big, fancy gravesites: nineteenth century family plots, with tall, marble obelisks and statues of weeping angels. Some of them have creepy stone and marble mausoleums. Mausoleums are tombs the size of tiny houses with windows and even gates and front porches sometimes. You could go inside one if someone unlocked the door.

Some kids had obviously partied out by the mausoleums the night before.  They’d left a White Claw can one at of the sad angels’ feet. A few more cans were tossed on the ground and on the stone stairs to one of the bigger tombs. There were beer cans, too.

Zoey shook her head. “Some people are still getting out at night.”

“They could have at least recycled!”

“Alas!”

See, Zoey, Dylan, and me… We’re the kind teachers and parents don’t worry about. We always recycle. We don’t break quarantine. We wouldn’t have gone to a midnight graveyard party before quarantine … well … not without seriously good reason.

Not that Zoey wouldn’t snag a White Claw. And I did sneak out on one serious midnight date when Dylan and I were first together. But I also had to zap a demon that evening. Which was the last time anything interesting happened to me… Up until the very next minute, that is.

‘Cause then it wasn’t a pretty April day anymore. It was very cold and very dark. Zoey and I were still in the cemetery, but we weren’t by ourselves anymore.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Christine Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a (for-real) haunted house in New York’s Hudson River Valley, not that far from Sleepy Hollow.  She is the author of Evernight Teen’s Bean Books, a five book series that travels through time—and two generations of characters. Christine is has also been a teacher, a bell ringer in the towers of old churches, a DJ, and a singer of all kinds of music. Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines like Rattle and Kestrel, featured on ABC Radio News, and sold in gum ball machines. She lives with her organist husband Ken and two indulged kitties.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christine.potter.543/

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/chrispygal/

Blog: chrispygal.weebly.com

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Christine-Potter/e/B001K7URHS/

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE

Christine Potter will be awarding $50 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

RAFFLECOPTER:

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f4344