The Time Tider by Sinéad O’Hart

We have a hugely inspiring guest blog from Sinéad O’Hart about how an idea for a story stuck with her until she could put the right time, setting and characters into place.

Every book an author writes means something different to them, I think. Perhaps it’s their first published book (but maybe the tenth one they wrote); it’s the book that pulled them through a tough time; it’s the first book they finished after becoming a parent, or it’s the book they never thought they’d actually manage to complete. For me, The Time Tider is a strange mix of a lot of things. Firstly, it’s a very old story – to me, at least. It was one of the first ‘this could actually be a book!’ ideas I ever had, and I’ll never forget the feeling of possibility that fizzed through me as I thought about it, planning it out inside my head. It was the idea that made me reconsider all my life plans up to that point: was I on the right path? Should I try to actually be an author? Were my dreams truly worth something?

When I came up with the first bones of the idea that would become The Time Tider, I was eating lunch in the café of the university where I was studying and working at the time. It was about twenty years ago, and I was just beginning my training as an academic, fulfilling my other long-held dream of completing a PhD. As I ate, I was reading a book – Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, by the French medieval historian Jacques le Goff. The book was fascinating, absorbing me completely – and then I reached a section where le Goff talks about how ideas about time changed when mechanised clocks, in newly-built clock towers, started chiming out the hours, sounding their bells across the fields where people would once have risen and gone to bed with the sun and eaten when they were hungry. Up to this point, people had used nature to tell time, and now the Church, and commerce, were using machines to tell a completely different sort of time. The flash of an idea burst across my mind. What if there was a gap between the two times … and what if that gap was filled with the unused Time of all the people who die before they’re supposed to … and what if it was possible to go back and collect that unused Time…

I had nothing to write with, besides the stub of a pencil, and nothing to write on besides a Customer Satisfaction Survey card that was on the café table, leaving me very little blank space to work with – but I did my best. I filled that card with thoughts about a book I wanted to call Tider, an idea that made me crackle with excitement.

But having an idea and making a book out of it are two different things. I tried to write The Time Tider many times, trying out different settings, secondary characters, and mechanisms for wriggling through Time – and all the while, I was working through my doctorate, trying to forge a career in a challenging industry (and not quite getting there), keeping myself afloat by working in a variety of unpredictable jobs, and finally starting a family and embarking on my writing career. I was lucky enough to be published, again and again, but thoughts about Time, and Warps, and harvesting lost moments, were always there, never content to be left unwritten.

So I came up with a setting I’d never tried before: a contemporary one. I imagined a scene where a girl and her dad are sleeping in the back of a van – the van they live in – and someone throws a brick through their window. The scene grabbed me, and I knew I finally had the right place, the right time period and the right characters to tell my decades-old tale about Time and the girl who knows she must get to the bottom of her family’s role in safeguarding it. (The lesson here? Never give up.)

Many things have changed since that first flash of an idea, including character names, book titles, and more, but the core of the story has always remained. I hope, so much, that you’ll enjoy being part of Mara’s adventure, that you’ll enjoy meeting Jan, a boy who bites off a bit more than he can chew (easy to do, when you’re dealing with something as vast as Time) and that you’ll keep them company as they unravel the mysteries of Mara’s family, mysteries which have wide and unpredictable repercussions. I’m so glad to have brought this idea from an exciting spark to a finished story, and delighted to be handing it over now, for readers to make it their own.

Time and Tide may wait for none … but will they wait for you?

The Time Tider is published by Little Tiger and is available now.

 

Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.