When I was growing up, I used to pretend that I was Sally Shoskies, the child prodigy head of a major film studio named Shoskies Pictures. One of Shoskies’s major “releases” of 1995 was Forward to the Future, about a girl who traveled in her grandfather’s time machine to the far distant year of 2019, where she met her future husband and children, saw flying cars, and had to save her family from an evil rival time traveler. (Originality was still something I was working on.)
As hard as it is to believe sometimes, the actual 2019 is actually here. I have never been so excited for a new year in a long time, as I hope, God-willing, to hang out in October with my lovely fellow Jane Austen fans in Colonial Williamsburg at the 2019 JASNA AGM and release three new books! All details are subject to change, of course, but here are three little sneak peeks at what I’ve been working on.
First up, after much retooling, Once Upon My Mind is finally, finally close to being ready in time for an Easter 2019 release! Rachel MacDonald is just as imaginative as I was as a child, but instead of imagining films, she imagines stories about what happened to the characters from her favorite book, The Park Avenue Prince. When dragons and elves start magically appearing in her quiet north Texas suburb, Rachel finds out Fabula, the magical land from her stories, is a real place, her characters are real people, and she and her family are in very real danger from people dead-set on literally re-writing history. Be sure to follow me (@authorhannahvale) on Facebook and Instagram as I will be introducing more of the characters from the story in a few weeks.
Then this summer, look out for two new books from the world of Time and Tenacity. What if you wrote a letter to your favorite author and they wrote back? And, oh yeah, what if that author has been dead for over two hundred years? That’s the situation Anna Kelly (yes, that Anna Kelly) finds herself in in a new Time and Tenacity novelette, Anna and Miss Austen, when she finds a small pocket of time dust that lets her communicate with none other than Jane Austen herself. I’m really excited about this one because a.) who wouldn’t want be pen pals with Jane Austen? and b.) I’ve grown increasingly more convinced in the last three years that I gave Anna a raw deal in Time and Tenacity and so this is a chance for her to give her a little more character development and maybe even the chance to travel in time herself.
Finally, in August 2019, look out for the long-awaited Time and Tenacity, Volume II! This time, it’s Colin and Brittany Darcy who are the fishes out of the water when Brit finds herself stranded in 1799. Find out what happened to Jane Farnsworth and her family and friends next and get more of a glimpse into what life as a member of the time travel research project is like.
Whether you arrived in 2019 by time machine or the old-fashioned way, I hope you are having a great year so far! I will be off-line more for the next month or so as I put the finishing touches on all three of these projects, but I hope to be back with covers for the two Time books, excerpts, and other diverting information soon.
Hannah Vale 