A mysterious labyrinth. A desperate king. A rebellious princess.
Being stuck in a crumbling old villa in Crete with her annoying, history-obsessed little brother Remy isn’t exactly Netta’s idea of a fun summer holiday. But before she can even get bored, Netta starts having very real dreams where she is dragged back thousands of years to Ancient Greece. Here, King Minos is preparing for the opening of his precious labyrinth, and there are rumours that a monster lurks inside.
As Netta becomes more drawn to the past, her present-day self starts slipping away. Netta and Remy must figure out what is pulling her back before they run out of time – and if they don’t solve the puzzle soon, Netta might just become history herself.
Jennifer Claessen’s page-turner of a time travel mystery was published today! She wrote a piece for us about ideas:
I have an idea! Is it mine?
I don’t know if all writers experience a blind panic that follows an idea but I do.
Last night, for example, I dreamt about zombies but who chase the living with affection, just wanting to love them, pass on the kiss of death. This idea feels FUN and odd – it was a dream after all – kiss chase zombies?! What’s that about?
But immediately on waking, I tried to cite the sources for this dream. I’ve watched the first series of The Last of Us – maybe that planted this seed. I saw the film Warm Bodies years ago – maybe that is the inspiration?!
There are a few analogies I think are useful – the first that ideas must be like magnets, gathering the iron filings of other ideas to them. The other is that our brains (braiiiins) are just giant composters, mulching together what we read, watch, hear and spitting it out, hopefully in new and interesting ways.
And as authors, we must ensure that what our brains (braiiiiiiins) spit out is uniquely ours. Originality is so rare, everything is recycled and comes back around again, especially when working with myth and legend as I do.
Netta Becker and the Timeline Crime grew from a ‘magnet idea’ – to mix my metaphors, it just kept snowballing, growing and sucking in more ideas as it went.
Here are some of my notes that I made in July 2022 when I started to experiment:
NEW NOVEL IDEA
Netta is called back to a certain time period to solve a ‘cold case’?
It LOOKS and FEELS like being transported to a different era but it’s actually an intense haunting?
This idea felt so compelling, I wasn’t sure if I had made it up myself or if it had entered the compost of my brain from elsewhere. I was cautious. I did a lot of time travel research! I knew HOW I wanted my protagonist, Netta, to travel, I just wasn’t sure where I wanted her to go.
I wrote:
No equipment to travel in? The world just grows up around her?
I wrote to my agent, trying to sell her on this concept:
A focus on the sidelined women in myths and unworshipped gods. Curriculum links!
I tried to be very professional by making a business case for why I thought this is a good idea. I have a lot of ideas and many of them are unsaleable so I had to be convincing.
I spent ages on the mechanism of time travel, tried to ensure that WHY Netta time travels remains an exciting mystery.
Only once the idea had nested in my brain for a whole year did I begin writing.
I wrote, in something a bit like a ‘writing journal’:
I stop reading any other fiction. I know that the new idea will drive other stuff out. Some non-fiction books arrive that I want for research purposes. My ideas about the book radically shift.
I stick a lot of post-it notes to the wall and talk the plot through in a LOT of detail.
I feel now, in publication month, more panicked than ever – will people like it? Will people get it? – but the worry about whether this idea is mine is gone: Netta Becker time travels in her own way. The question now is, when haunted, when sucked into the past by a crime in the timeline, whether she can get back home?
In the meantime, I’ll be on the internet, googling zombie romances to check if they’ve been done before.
