AUTHORS’ NOTE
Well, that’s the end of Time Trials, and we sincerely hope you enjoyed it.
This was the first, but certainly not the last writing collaboration between Mike and Dave. We wanted to have a section in this book where we can introduce ourselves, give you a little insight into who we are, what our thought processes were with regards to this book, and maybe even where we’re going with what will be a series of books.
We are authors with a rather lengthy list of books to our names, but we are by no means similar in how we came to be authors, nor in the type of things we normally write. I guess the easiest way to introduce ourselves is by just diving in, and let’s start with the Rothman portion of the Rothman/Butler duo.
I started this author thing accidentally, and by that, I mean years ago I had two young boys who enjoyed their bedtime stories. And my attempts to create off-the-cuff stories were pretty elaborate and to remain consistent I began to write things down. That was the beginning of a slippery slide into authordom for me.
As to my background, I’ve worked most of my life in various engineering disciplines, with my formal education being in the hard sciences. And I’ve spent most of my career in Silicon Valley companies as a designer and inventor of cool things. And during that long career, I’ve traveled the world and seen many things that help bring color to my work. My writing has naturally evolved to focus on stories heavily laden with science, action, and adventure.
I’ll hand the virtual microphone over to Dave so he can introduce himself:
I have wanted to write novels since I was seven years old and first read Tolkien. Compromises with the real world have led me to spend a lot of time practicing law, consulting, training, and editing. That experience has included lots of travel (I lived in Italy for two years and in England for almost five) and immersion in a broad spectrum of languages, cultures, history, and music (personally, I play guitar). I write about things that I think are important, which generally lie closer to the human heart and unconscious mind than to the hard sciences.
The two of us have known each other for years in author circles and have been friendly, but generally didn’t write the same kind of stuff. While Mike’s focus is often around thriller elements and science in our world, Dave’s writing tends to have a distinctive historical flavoring to it that lends itself to different worlds, and certainly different times in history.
Mike had recently found some success in taking an unusual approach to a genre called LitRPG, and when talking with Dave, the idea of putting their talents together in a similar fashion struck a note that seemed both unlikely and possibly new and exciting.
Could we convince a reader of thrillers to enjoy a book that had elements of “magic” in it? Could we “sciencify” (a technical term) a novel that had fantasy elements in it and keep a fantasy audience entertained? And all the while, base the story out of our own ancient histories . . . ? It was either madness or genius, and we suppose time will tell if it’s either of those or lands somewhere in the middle.
Now that we’re done and we can look back at all the work that went into this, the writing process was somewhat hilarious.
You can imagine the “discussions” between the science guy moaning about the fantasy guy’s fantasy elements and the fantasy guy being exasperated with the science guy’s insistence that every single thing needed to have a non-hand-wavy basis behind it.
In the end, we’re both pleased with how things have settled and it clears a pathway for us moving forward.
Did we say moving forward? We did . . .
As the story clearly indicated through the last scene, we set up what will be the beginning of the next book in the series.
We can’t say too much about where we’re going. Suffice it to say that we have a very clear objective (ending book) in mind, but the path to that book may take us through different places and times.
You may be exposed to historical events that you’re barely aware of, and maybe some you’re intimately familiar with.
The path will be a rocky one for our intrepid team of adventurers.
But we hope you’ll appreciate the payoff once we get you to the end.
Thanks for reading Time Trials, and there’s lots more where that came from.
—Mike and Dave
We should note that if you’re interested in getting updates about our latest work, we have links below so you can join our mailing lists.
M.A. Rothman: mailinglist.michaelarothman.com/new-reader
D.J. Butler: davidjohnbutler.com/mailinglist/