She was the James Bond of time travelers - always having a Plan B in mind, never losing her cool. I settled in to pen an adventure about her dangerous rescues, perilous circumstances, and the struggle to protect the space-time continuum as she travels about in history.īut I think I knew, deep down, that Elise was a little too good at her job, a bit too skilled with blending into the past eras where she frequented. So I started writing about Elise, a professional time traveler who jumps around through time, helping out clients who get into sticky situations on their vacations to the past.

Only instead of focusing on the time traveling tourist herself, I wanted this story to be about the people who work at the travel agency, whose responsibility it is to bring them safely back to the present from their adventures. My story, I’d decided, would be based on a short story I’d written a few months earlier about a time traveler returning home from a vacation in the past. It was the third of November when I’d decided I wanted to try my hand at National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), when I started writing that day, I had little more than the premise and a few key scenes to work off of. I’ve always been fascinated with time travel stories, so when I sat down to write THE CONTINUUM, I knew that was what I wanted this story to be about. Which is why our Spark of Life guest this week, Wendy Nikel, looked for a way to put her super-competent heroine out of her element, into a situation where she’d really have to stretch to win. When the character is ready for everything, has a skill for every challenge and a solution for every problem, there’s never really any uncertainty about how it will turn out. Super-competent protagonists can be a lot of fun - but sometimes it seems like there’s a cap on how much fun they can be.

The Continuum by Wendy Nikel