History of writing Time Crystal

I got a letter from Enid which said

I prefer Wilbur Smith books on Egypt.
BUT I am very very interested in how you write about these things and how your brain concieves these ideas.
And how close to the truth you are, will you still be interested in talking to me.
The whole thing gets the brain in gear.
Did do some writing at night school for a while, improved my English a little but thats about all really.

So tell me more please.
Did you have to do a lot of research?
Enid

I started doing research on the History of the Universe in 1975, and produced the first book in 1992 and the web site (www.historyoftheuniverse.com) in 1998. I call this subject hotu. It involves the fusion of a wide range of science and history into an incredible story which shows us where we came from and gives us clues about where we’re going. As a result of these many years of research I now have a library of thousands of books on almost every aspect of this subjects. Even more important, the web has come along and given me access to a vastly bigger library.

That web site is pretty successful. It gets over a million visitors a year and Google advertising nets me about $10 a day. I had always wanted tell this story as a work of fiction but was too busy earning money.

I started writing seriously soon after Sept 11, 2001, when I was made redundant from my job as a computer consultant and found I had enough cash that I never needed to work again. I began work trying to fulfil a life-long ambition. It was now or never!

It took me 6 months to decide whether I was writing fact or fiction. You can tell I hadn’t really committed to the fiction thing. I knew it would be very hard work. I’m not really a people person, and I was very worried about whether I could create believable characters. Also the amount of time you would have to spend describing the characters meant that there would be very little time to deal with the science.

Once I’d decided that it WOULD be fiction I then searched around for a scenario. How do you get your characters to go back in time to the Big Bang and yet have the reader really believe it was happening (or at least make it sufficiently credible that she would suspend her disbelief). I went through about a dozen totally different ideas until I hit on what I finally ended up with: A black hole is created inside the ATLAS detector in CERN, Switzerland which absorbs some characters and takes them back to the Big Bang and beyond. When they get there something happens and time stops on Earth. The characters left on Earth find some crystal around which time still works. They have a challenge: go down the time tunnel, rescue the lost characters and restart time. If they fail time will be frozen forever.

This scenario gives me exactly what I want. On the way down the tunnel the characters have many adventures as they emerge in different historical situations. It is real. They are now building a new accelerator in CERN which might indeed create black holes, so it’s entirely believable. CERN also publish a lot of information and I was lucky (and wealthy) enough to be able to go there several times and do research and take photos of the actual situation, which I now use to describe the scenes and create illustrations.

As well as finding this scenario (and beleive me that was hard enough) I also had to learn how to create characters. After a lot more research I found the Enneagram which I used as the skeleton for my characters. I spent a lot more time on false starts and wrong turns (which I continue to make even now).

There was another set of research into the mechanics of writing, getting criticism etc which I’ll get round to on the next post.

Thanks for your interest.

Phil