Wow, don’t you love when stuff like that happens. Life imitating art. A lot of the fun in this book for me was the linguistic stylings of each of the characters. Dallan speaking like a highlander for instance, and then there’s Kwaku’s dialect.
Dallan’s dialect I had to really research to get down and make authentic. Kwaku, on the other hand, came fully loaded more or less. When he opened his mouth to speak and pronounced his ‘th’s’ as ‘d’s’, I just thought, “Why not?” So I let him do his thing. Also, Kwaku himself was taken as a Time Master’s prodigy at a very young age, nine as I recall, and these are facts which also are explained in TM2 The Prophecy. He is from the year 3190, about 500 years before John and Lany’s time of 3698. So who knows what their speech patterns and dialects would be? I let the character decide for me.
There are so many scenes in this book where love and relationships are explored and examined. One of the best was the one where Dallan realizes he’s being “addled by a lass” – the Maiden, in particular. Was that fun to write?
Oh yes, all the relational scenes were a lot of fun to write. And so many of us can relate to what the characters are going through. Personally, I think my favorite scene to write was “First Kiss” as it exemplifies the sudden awkward feelings we all get when meeting someone for the first time, and the sometimes inner battle that takes place.
Actually, come to think of it the book deals with the three eternals, doesn’t it? There are three things that endure: faith, hope, and love. Is that one of the themes? And if it is, when did you become consciously aware that those elements were important to the plot?
Faith was always a theme with its threads woven into the tapestry of the story. But all three I did not become fully consciously aware of until after it was written. You have each thread demonstrated in so many different ways throughout the book. Because I was writing the book for fun and just for me, I never got into pre-weaving the elements into an outline or anything. They just naturally happened.
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