Time Lions and the Chrono-Loop by Krystal Sutherland

“Time Lions began with an accident”, what a great first line to our blog today. Author Krystal Sutherland shares how the book and concept, Time Lions, came about!

 

Time Lions began with an accident.  

 I (Krystal) was researching something for another book. I went to search for “Ancient Greeks” on Google, but I made a spelling mistake: I typed Ancient Geeks” instead – and not much came up. (There seems to be a podcast now, but back in late 2019, there was nothing!)  

I immediately thought it would be a funny title for a kid’s book, and I told Martin what I’d found later that day. We were walking home together on the streets of London, and we fell into an unplanned brainstorm. A book called Ancient Geeks would be about time travel (obviously they’d go to Ancient Greece) and what if it was from the perspective of twins, a boy and a girl? What if they were Sri Lankan, like Martin, and what if… we wrote it together?  

At that point, Martin’s background in physics, medicine and AI meant that he’d written extensively for scientific journals, and he’d had some poetry published, but he had little experience writing fiction. Still, we’d been mulling over the idea of collaborating for a while, inspired by our friends Katie and Kevin Tsang, another married couple who write the Dragon Mountain series together.  

When the pandemic began a few months later, and London entered its first lockdown, the idea for Ancient Geeks resurfaced. Trapped inside week after week, we set ourselves the task of doing something other than doomscrolling: outlining two chapters at a time, each going off to write our chapter, and then reading them aloud to each other when they were done. It quickly became apparent that Martin was an annoyingly good writer (as I’d suspected!); his chapters made me laugh out loud, and I started to think… we could actually do this. We could actually write a book together.  

We sent off the first rough draft to our (then just my) literary agent toward the end of 2020. Her feedback? There’s something here – but you need to scrap this draft and start over again. It was gutting news to hear – but she was right, as agents so often are. Neither Martin nor I had written middle grade before, and the voice wasn’t quite there, nor the stakes quite high enough.  

So we started over. From scratch. With a completely empty document, and armed only with what we’d originally brought to the story many months earlier: time travel, twins, Sri Lanka. How could we take the same ingredients and turn them into something that worked?  

This time, we thought much bigger and started asking more questions. What if our brilliant twins weren’t the first to invent time travel? Actually, what if time travel was something that was so frequently stumbled upon that an entire secret agency was set up to police it? TIME (The Interdimensional Misconduct Enquiry) was born, as were the TIME Trials to join it. Oh and what if the villain wasn’t the bully at school, but someone with much more power: a young, brilliant startup founder with good intentions that lead to a dark alternate reality.  

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when we realised our twins needed to travel back in time not to ancient Greece, but to ancient Sri Lanka, their country of heritage. Sadly, we had to let the title that had started it all go, and Ancient Geeks became Time Lions.  

With our different backgrounds, Martin and I are still learning how to collaborate with each other (we take a lot of long walks and deliver feedback whilst staring at the horizon; eye contact is forbidden!), but since starting Time Lions, we’ve also become parents, and that has taught us a lot about how to work together: how to divide and conquer, how to take the lead when the other is burnt out, and above all, how to communicate from a place of deep and gentle kindness.  

 

Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.