Inspiration for "A Portal in Time"

Inspiration for a novel can come from the most unusual of circumstances, and the idea for “A Portal in Time” is no exception. In the year 2000, my husband and I took a trip up the California coast to Carmel-by-the-Sea on the hauntingly beautiful Monterey Peninsula. As it was our one year wedding anniversary, we had reservations for the weekend at Carmel's historic, La Playa Hotel-- a hotel we'd never stayed in before. Everything about the lobby of the antiquated hotel piqued my interest, and as my husband checked us in, I let my imagination roam free, taking in every inch of the opulent lobby with its travertine floors, sand-stone fireplace, and sweeping Mediterranean tiled staircase. I explored a particular hallway looking at architectural maps of various stages of the hotel's growth that hung beside sepia tinted photographs of people in period clothing. By the time my husband came to find me, I had already envisioned myself living in a house of this exact constitution, wearing a dress exactly like the one I saw in one of the photographs. Next, I started thinking of what it was like to be alive at the turn of the 19th century, living in a house by the sea along with how it would feel to have it as the setting of my life. I decided I would love it-- that there would be a fabulous, interesting, fully-realized life at play with myself at the center of a thriving artistic community and oh the thrill of the environment.
But it occurred to me that life is life, and things happen to people unwittingly, and the story of people’s lives tend to happen in increments of cause and effect no matter where one lives.
My eyes kept returning to the lobby’s staircase, and I wanted to climb them to their top. When I did, I was drawn to a wooden cathedral door at the end of a long hallway. I stood looking down the hall thinking, “If this were my house, the master bedroom would be at the end of this hall with a bay window overlooking a garden.” I could feel myself standing before the window as if I were looking at my garden, then I started asking, “Now why would I be here looking out the window?”
“A Portal in Time,” my paranormal/historical novel, is the explanation of an entire imagined life that brought me to that window at the top of the stairs in Carmel’s La Playa Hotel. I decided the story would be best told in oscillating time periods in order to lend an eerie, mystical feel. I like to give my readers an experience by taking them on a journey. I want them to see and hear and feel everything for themselves by giving them a specific reality, and in this case, the reality is “A Portal in Time.”

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