Centuries ago, the passion they shared as Native American lovers ended in tragedy. Together again and unaware of the past, can they claim the love that's rightfully theirs?
Seattle newspaper reporter Lainey Hughes is desperate to find her mother who has disappeared into a doomsday cult sequestered somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
Description:
Centuries ago, the passion they shared as Native American lovers ended in tragedy. Together again and unaware of the past, can they claim the love that's rightfully theirs?
Seattle newspaper reporter Lainey Hughes is desperate to find her mother who has disappeared into a doomsday cult sequestered somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
She teams up with Gage Stuart, a jaded cop whose young son is also being held there. As they race up the coast in a kayak searching for their loved ones, Lainey’s visions show her the past . . . the present . . . and the future.
Lives are on the line. Love is within reach. And trust is hard to come by.
WHAT LAINEY SEES may help two wounded souls embrace their future . . . but only if they’ll learn from past mistakes.
GUEST POST
Twists and turns in a Time Travel romance/suspense
Thanks very much for hosting me and featuring What Lainey Sees on Mythical Books. I’m happy to be here!
The question is an interesting one. I believe every book, regardless of its genre, has twists and turns. Or it should have. Along with writing romance and women’s fiction as Laura Tobias, I also write YA and children’s fiction as Laura Langston. Twists and turns are equally important no matter what age group you write for or what type of genre you’re writing in. In fact, they’re integral to every story with a plot! My job as a writer is to make those twists and turns so compelling and believable that the reader has no choice but to turn page after page in order to find out what happens next.
Having said that, What Lainey Sees posed some unique challenges as I wrote it. It’s not a classic time travel in the sense of the word but more of a past life romance where the main characters experience themselves living in two distinctly different time periods, with both time periods impacting and influencing the other. In the present day, Seattle newspaper reporter Lainey Hughes is desperate to find her mother who has disappeared into a doomsday cult sequestered somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. She teams up with Gage Stuart, a jaded cop whose young son is also being held there. As they race up the coast in a kayak searching for their loved ones, their past life intrudes. Lainey has visions of being a powerful Indian shaman woman called Bright Eyes and she knows, with certainty, that Gage was her lover in that life – a powerful Nootka warrior named Satsokis. Their tempestuous and tragic past hundreds of years earlier means trust is hard to come by today. And trust is desperately needed if they’re to save their loved ones and rekindle the passion between them.
One of the advantages in writing a past life novel is the ability to bring out the motivations, fears and belief systems of the main characters without a lot of backstory. Lainey, for instance, has psychic ability but it’s suppressed. In her past life as Bright Eyes, using her psychic ability led to a tragic outcome. It’s more powerful to illustrate that through active scenes showing the twists and turns between Bright Eyes and Satsokis rather than through narrative. It’s more fun for the reader too. And when we flip back to the Lainey/Gage story line, the ancient argument flares again, only it’s playing out in a more contemporary way.
One of the challenges in a dual life story line is that flipping back and forth between the two story lines. I wanted to avoid one story overpowering the other. I wanted each story to stand alone. It was important to me that the stories featuring both Lainey and Gage, and Bright Eyes and Satsokis, had their own twists and turns as their individual plots progressed. And that is there. I also wanted the flow between the present and the past to be seamless, so I worked hard to ensure the transitions between present day Seattle and the Native American coastal life of the 1700s flowed easily. And I’m quite happy with the way they turned out.
As I mentioned earlier, my job as a writer is to make the twists and turns in any story so compelling that the reader must keep going. To do that, I need to create believable settings for my characters to live in. In What Lainey Sees, Bright Eyes and Satsokis are devoted Native Americans living in the Pacific Northwest in the 1700s. Their world is a very different milieu than the world Lainey and Gage inhabit in present day Seattle. So certainly the twists and turns of someone living in the modern world will be different from the twists and turns one would face living several centuries earlier. But in the end, all that matters is that the twists and turns lead to some kind of satisfying resolution. And in this case, since it is a romance, that means a happily ever after.
Thanks again for letting me drop in at Mythical Books. Happy reading!
Laura Tobias
About the author:
By the time she hit Grade Four, Laura Tobias knew she was going to be a writer. So did the teachers. It was the persistent daydreaming and invisible friends that tipped them off. The question was: how could she daydream for the rest of her life and get paid for it? The answer: Trade the crayons for a computer and write those stories down. Oh, and grow up first. She’s managed the first two. She’s still working on the growing up part.
Laura Tobias lives with her family, including two Shetland sheepdogs, in the Pacific Northwest. She’s an award winning author of 19 books for teens and children written as Laura Langston. Visit her:
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