I’m often asked how I came up with the idea for The Girl Between The Worlds (and, subsequently The Travelers Alliance).
While I’ve had several ideas for stories over the years, this is the first one that really took off and grew into a full manuscript. The funny thing is, when I started writing TGBTW, I wasn’t sure exactly what it was going to be, and I was less than confident I would complete it. But I was determined to do everything I could to make it happen.
Being a huge Doctor Who and Howl’s Moving Castle fan, I began with the idea of a story revolving somehow around a “traveler” who would show the main character a different world. However, I’ll stress here that, after talking to young adult readers, it was clear that the main character needed to be able to take care of herself, and also overcome any odds without the help of the story’s male character.
When I started planning, I began with one sentence:
When a mysterious boy shows up, a teenager discovers she has magic powers and can also engage in inter-dimensional time travel.
Pretty simple, right? Ah, but what’s the actual story? I expanded that sentence into a paragraph:
Marin thought she as just a typical teenage girl living in a small town. But on her way to the city one weekend, her train crashes, and a mysterious boy named Roan saves her in the nick of time. He takes her to another dimension, where she is asked to join a coalition of time and dimension jumping sorcerers. She turns them down and returns to her home dimension, but when a sorceress (Nerissa) plots to torture Marin’s father, she seeks out the coalition’s help to rescue him. She trains with them, leading up to a face-off against Nerissa.
And while quite a bit has changed since I wrote that original paragraph, the basic idea of the story is the same.
However, as I went through the discovery phase, that is where the real magic in the process happened.
At first, it was just Marin and Roan. But then, I realized that I wanted to separate the magic-wielding beings (magi) from those who hailed from Earth. It was then that I decided to introduce our beloved Alastair—the Time Traveler from the future Earth. I also made the decision to limit the magi’s power so that, while they can travel through dimensional planes, they cannot travel through time. This differentiates them from the nomads from our future, as the nomads can travel through time and space, utilizing their technology (which the magi cannot use). Just introducing Alastair created a whole extra layer, as well as an intricate rule system.
From there, everything else came together quite easily. Marin and Alastair’s relationship was extremely natural. While Alastair is a significant part of Marin’s journey, I was careful to create scenes in which Alastair was forced to take a step back and trust Marin to be able to handle whatever was before her.
If some of this speaks to you and what you’d like to see in a story, drop a comment below! I’d love to hear from you.