What if you can’t get your two favorite heroes from history to play nice? That’s the problem my main character, art historian May Gold has in my WIP novel The Renaissance Club. She has a plan to get her idol, Gianlorenzo Bernini, the rock star artist of the Renaissance, and his chief rival, architect Borromini, to play nice and work together. Trouble is, she has to travel four centuries to bring it about. Time isn’t…
Time Travel Devices – Is It Fantasy or Sci-Fi? Time travel novels span many literary genres. You can find them in science fiction, fantasy, literary, and romance categories on Amazon. Between H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series lies a vast continent of stories of moving backwards and forwards in time. Often, the category depends on the mechanism for time traveling. If it’s mechanical, it generally conforms to science fiction. If it’s…
Because I’ve written a mainstream (not fantasy) novel involving time travel, I’m reading as many of them as I can find. Lo and behold, besides the obvious science fiction writers, it turns out that many literary and mainstream authors also have used the device of traveling through time, including: Marge Piercy, Stephen King, Erica Jong, Michael Crichton, Kurt Vonnegut, Anya Seton, Alan Lightman, and Chuck Palahniuk. Time travel stories come in all shapes and sizes,…
While researching time-travel novels as I work on my novel, The Renaissance Club, I saw that Google can grab plenty of articles that answer the question, “When is the best time to travel to Italy?” But none answered, “The Seventeenth Century.” It seems Rick Steeves and Frommer’s can’t propel me back in time to the Renaissance and Baroque to watch splendors of art and architecture arise from the workshops of Gianlorenzo Bernini and his competitors.…
I don’t want to finish revising my novel, The Renaissance Club, because then I will have to leave the Italy in my mind. Unless I can conjure up another Italy-centered project or a plane ticket, it’s my best form of travel these days, the armchair, or should I say deskchair variety of touring. And there are only two distant places I’ve ever visited: India and Italy. Of the two, it’s more comfortable by far to…
I’m coming down the home stretch (= two-thirds through) of what I sincerely hope is the final revision of my time travel novel, The Renaissance Club. I’m past fallen-in-love with Gianlorenzo Bernini — I’m in the forming-a-fan-club stage. If only for this sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, made early in his magnificent career as a sculptor. He was also the official architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome under two popes. When I say buried…
Today I’m working on my time travel novel set in Renaissance and present-day Italy, featuring the genius sculptor and architect who invented The Baroque style, Gianlorenzo Bernini. Of this sumptuous sculpture of Bernini’s beloved, Costanza Piccolomini, art historian Jonathan Jones wrote: “He has made an intimate monument to secret moments, a sculpted memento of his lover, whose marble reality dissolves, when you chance on her among the stony dead, into breath, life. Bernini’s genius for…
Gianlorenzo Bernini Sculpting in Clay I’m writing a story about a 17th century artist and a 21st century art historian meeting, and the big question is, what does he have to say to her, and what does she have to say to him? My main character has done her Master’s thesis on the sculptor/architect and meets him in person in St. Peter’s basilica, thanks to a magic time-shifting gold pen. Is she kind of his…
I like that term better than “paranormal romance,” which sounds like it should involve bending spoons, which is only slightly weirder-sounding than the term I ran across in Wikipedia searches of literary genres: “monster erotica.” Alrighty then. It’s true that I am writing a time travel romance involving the great Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini (great is the adjective he insists on accompanying his name, like some people insist on their middle names). It’s set in…
I’ve returned to working on my novel about Italy. Took a wonderful webinar from The Book Doctors, Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, and it was so full of great tips for editing your novel, that I was itching to open the last draft. Their book, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, really is a must-have. It’s on my Kindle. And the BEST PART: if you buy a copy, The Book Doctors will…