The After Times

 

The After Times

by Christine Potter

 

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GENRE: YA Fantasy--Time Traavel

 

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BLURB:

 

Say you’re Gracie Ingraham, nerdy but happy high school senior. But you’re also a time-traveler from 1962 who got a bit lost and has been living in the 2000’s since 2018. That would be plenty without it now being 2020. Covid has just shut down the world. Your pandemic pod? Your BFF Zoey—and your ex-boyfriend, Dylan.

 

Dylan still lives to spin weird vinyl LP’s with your sort-of, kind-of Dad, Amp. So your quarantine hobby is going to have to be Being Mature About Stuff.

 

But then your time traveling kicks into high gear again.  And your long-lost brother and mom mix it up with a creepy, pyromaniacal force that is most likely demonic. How can love save the day when you can’t even go downtown without wearing a mask?

 

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EXCERPT

 

We’d arrived at the first of the big, fancy gravesites: nineteenth century family plots, with tall, marble obelisks and statues of weeping angels. Some of them have creepy stone and marble mausoleums. Mausoleums are tombs the size of tiny houses with windows and even gates and front porches sometimes. You could go inside one if someone unlocked the door.

 

Some kids had obviously partied out by the mausoleums the night before.  They’d left a White Claw can one at of the sad angels’ feet. A few more cans were tossed on the ground and on the stone stairs to one of the bigger tombs. There were beer cans, too. 

 

Zoey shook her head. “Some people are still getting out at night.” 

 

“They could have at least recycled!”

 

“Alas!” 

 

See, Zoey, Dylan, and me… We’re the kind teachers and parents don’t worry about. We always recycle. We don’t break quarantine. We wouldn’t have gone to a midnight graveyard party before quarantine … well … not without seriously good reason. 

 

Not that Zoey wouldn’t snag a White Claw. And I did sneak out on one serious midnight date when Dylan and I were first together. But I also had to zap a demon that evening. Which was the last time anything interesting happened to me… Up until the very next minute, that is. 

 

‘Cause then it wasn’t a pretty April day anymore. It was very cold and very dark. Zoey and I were still in the cemetery, but we weren’t by ourselves anymore.

A Word With the Author

 1. Did you always want to be an author?

I think I did. I read before I went to school, and I was stapling together “books” when I was seven. I loved reading. Some of my happiest childhood memories are being stretched out on the beat-up three-seater couch my mom kept in a room we called “The Sun Porch. ” It was a little drafty in there in the winter time from its huge windows, and I remember rainy late fall afternoons, cuddled down with a book, just lost in a story. I wanted to be able to make that kind of magic. When I learned how to type on my mom’s old Smith-Corona, it was Jenny, bar the door. Writing felt like play to me. It still does. 

 

2. Tell us about the publication of your first book. 

 I published poetry long before I published fiction. My first book of poems (I have three out) was called Zero Degrees At First Light. I had just retired from teaching English, and the local paper came and took my picture. I remember giving the first reading to support it; my parents were still around then. They were in the audience, and I was skipping around, trying to find poems that wouldn’t make them mad!  I still write poems as much as I tell stories. 

 

My first novel felt much more like I had arrived. 

 

I’d been at Hedgebrook, a woman’s writing retreat on an island off Washington State. I was lucky enough to have Karen Joy Fowler, who wrote The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, for my mentor. I was terrified!  She was the first set of eyes on Time Runs Away With Her, the first book in the Bean series, which was my first novel. She loved my characters, and that gave me the strength to pull the book apart and put it back together about three times. Finally, it was accepted by Evernight Teen. (Yay, ET!!)  I was on vacation with my husband on Prince Edward Island when I got the news, and I went straight to the gravesite of Lucy Maud Montgomery to say thanks. I loved the Green Gables books, which is why the Bean Books are a series. 

 

3. Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in?

My favorite YA author that I’m pals with is my fellow ET-ite Marcus Damanda, who wrote the incredible Salvation State trilogy. It’s horrifying and fascinating and smart. Great characters, superb world-building, some of the vilest villains in all of fiction. I love those books. The only horror/dystopian author I know who can grab you faster and better is Stephen King. For real. My favorite YA author  all-around is probably still A Wrinkle in Time’s Madeleine L’Engle. Her blend of warmth and imagination is hard to beat. I try to take myself a little less seriously than she does, though…And yeah, there’s the matter of my last name. I come by it honestly. You have to love the Harry Potter books. The whole concept of there being a group of people nobody knows about who can do magic just fascinates me—and I explore it in another sense in my own work. In my books time-travelers are just people who can step out of their own time and see the past. There’s a community of them. I don’t do time machines, you know. For the record, I’m

disappointed with Rowling’s comments on trans people, though.  

4. What's the best part of being an author? The worst? The best part about it?  I think it’s reading back over an old book and discovering that it’s—wow—pretty excellent. How did I do that?  Hah!  I also love getting a good review. The worst is waiting for the first reviews to come in, and feeling swamped, as I often do, by the difficulty of getting a book that I really care about out into the world and into hands. In other words, please read my books :) !

 

5. What are you working on now?

Right now, I’m promoting The After Times!  That’s a full-time job. Press releases, blogs, letters to local journalists, all that. So many people have books now, it can be hard to get loft with a project unless you’re on a huge, ginormous publisher. Even if you are!!  I’ll probably write a poem or two this week. I do that all the time, still. And I’m trying to figure out what my next novel will be. It’ll be young adult, I’m pretty sure. I have a fragment about a young piano student during WW2 that I wrote, based on my mom. I might do something with that. I also have an idea about ouija boards. And one about past-life regression. Lots of teen girls go through a ghostly phase, and I want to do something with that. I’m in the daydream stage. 

 

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

Christine Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a (for-real) haunted house in New York’s Hudson River Valley, not that far from Sleepy Hollow.  She is the author of Evernight Teen’s Bean Books, a five book series that travels through time—and two generations of characters. Christine is has also been a teacher, a bell ringer in the towers of old churches, a DJ, and a singer of all kinds of music. Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines like Rattle and Kestrel, featured on ABC Radio News, and sold in gum ball machines. She lives with her organist husband Ken and two indulged kitties.

 

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christine.potter.543/

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/chrispygal/

Blog: chrispygal.weebly.com

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Christine-Potter/e/B001K7URHS/

 

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION 

Christine Potter will be awarding $50 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway