A Dinosaur Ate My Sister by Pooja Puri

This is the first book in the Marcus Rashford Book Club and huge numbers of children across the UK have been gifted a copy. We are so thrilled to have a guest post from author Pooja Puri!

Monsters and the Murkle: Writing time travel adventure for middle-grade Pooja Puri

I’ve always loved time travel adventures. Ever since I was a child, the thought of being able to whizz through time has always filled me with fascination. Who hasn’t dreamt of a spin in the Doctor’s Tardis? Or wondered what (or who!) they might encounter through the time-space continuum?

A Dinosaur Ate My Sister is a time travel adventure about Esha Verma, a genius inventor extraordinaire, who invents a time machine in her bedroom (with the help of her apprentice, Broccoli, and his tortoise, Archibald). Unfortunately, things get a little complicated when her big sister, Nishi, accidentally zaps herself to the Cretaceous Age…

There were three things I knew for certain before I began writing this story:

1. The time-space continuum aka the Murkle would need to have rules. I decided early on that the regulations in the world of the Murkle would be decreed by The Office of Time (T.O.O.T). But it was only through subsequent drafts that I really began to unpick the peculiarities of this world.

I think that much of fantasy world-building is about taking what you know, what is familiar, what you encounter in everyday life, and turning it upside-down and inside-out! In order to build this time travel world, I started with the smaller details. If there were an official organisation which controlled time travel, who would work for them? What would they wear? What gadgets might they have? Once I had this information in place, I began building the world outwards and upwards, and thinking about the bigger questions. What obstacles might they encounter? What weathers might they experience? What would they travel in? Were there any restrictions which determined when they could travel and if so, why?

2. Should we ever crack the mysteries of the time-space continuum, I am sure that we’ll probably encounter some truly terrifying timey-wimey creatures (hopefully not). I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of wormholes and black holes, so it seemed entirely fitting to combine the two to create the perfect lair for some blood-curdling monsters. Thinking about how these creatures would be adapted to live in the Murkle helped me to consider how they would interact with the world around them and, of course, with Esha and Broccoli!

3. I wanted the time travel aspect of my story to be as accessible to readers as possible. Starting the story in Esha’s bedroom helped me to establish a familiar ‘real-world’ starting point – one which would provide a stark contrast to their bonkers time travel adventure. However, it was only much later that I realised time travel is an absolute MONSTER for plotting. From the Grandfather Paradox to the Butterfly Effect to causal loops, time travel plots can get very confusing very fast! After losing myself in multiple timelines and arriving at several dead ends, I learnt that it was absolutely impossible to include every time travel concept in one story (alas!).

Instead, I decided to focus on what I found most exciting as a writer – after all, you can always save some adventures for another book…

About the Author: Pooja Puri graduated from King’s College London with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature. Whilst at university she read for a publishing house and has since worked in the education sector. In 2014, she was chosen as a winner of the Ideas Tap Writer’s Centre Norwich Inspires competition. She went on to complete the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University. Her debut novel The Jungle is a brave and beautiful narrative about two teenage refugees in Calais and was published by Black & White’s YA imprint Ink Road, in 2017. In 2018, The Jungle was nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal. A Dinosaur Ate My Sister is her debut middle grade novel and the first book selected for the Marcus Rashford Book Club.