The Journey Behind My Out Of Time Book Series and What Inspired Me to Write

Why did I decide to write and publish the Out Of Time book series?

Well, that’s simple: I wanted to. For me, it was something of a bucket-list item. I’ve always had a vivid imagination and enjoy creating things. Woodworking, pottery, and a million other ADHD rabbit holes of crafts and arts have all held my attention, but I’ve always had a massive respect for books and authors. My shelves are full of hobby manuals, reference texts, and fiction novels. The idea of immortalizing my words and thoughts in a book excited me.

A modest woodworking project might last 20 or 40 years if cared for. A masterfully crafted piece of furniture might endure 200 or even 400 years. Antiques are sought after, collected, and coveted. They tell a story about the maker if you know where to look. To me, this kind of legacy has weight. Creating something that will outlive me fills me with a sense of accomplishment.

That said, I fully expected my work to be like one of those antiques someday. Maybe one single copy would end up on the shelf of someone who appreciated it. For me, it wasn’t about success. It was about creating something, leaving a piece of myself in this world, and hoping someone, somewhere, might connect with me across time and space.

The Spark That Ignited My Passion

I’ve written chapters here and there: short stories, scenes, technical manuals, marketing copy, product labels, and even websites. But the one thing that always eluded me was a story I felt worth sharing.

There was also the issue of time. Writing a full-length novel requires a lot of it, and when we’re young, especially as young parents, time is monopolized by family, kids, obligations, work, bills, mowing the lawn, and all the other things that fill our lives. It was always my excuse not to write.

Then one day, while browsing my telescope’s companion app to see what was in the sky, I started dreaming again about traveling through space and seeing those places for myself. Later, I stumbled across an update on the Kepler mission.

If you’re not familiar, Kepler was a NASA space telescope launched in 2009 to find Earth-like planets in other systems. It stared at a single patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, watching the brightness of over 150,000 stars. When a planet passed in front of its star, the starlight dipped ever so slightly. By measuring those dips, Kepler could detect planets.

I found this fascinating. My whole life I had wondered about the “sensors” in science fiction. “Captain, sensor data shows…” was a line I had heard countless times, but rarely did anyone explain what those sensors were actually measuring. Kepler wasn’t magical, it was real science. You can even view its data yourself. Instead of some fictional life-sign detector, we have precision instruments measuring starlight down to tiny fluctuations caused by planets passing in front. That is just plain cool.

Sensor data shows a planet, Captain. It could be inhabitable.

Kepler-452 was the first potentially Earth-like planet discovered, with the right orbit and conditions for liquid water. Since then, many more candidates have been found, but that first one captivated me. I thought about visiting such a world. How amazing would it be to stand on another Earth-like planet so far away? What would I see? And how would we get there?

After months of research and daydreaming, the vision became so clear I had to write it out. Book 1 of the Out Of Time book series: Launch Point poured out of me. I wrote every day, often 8 to 12 hours, writing and researching. It took about three months to draft, after three to four months of outlining and worldbuilding. All told, Book 1 was finished in about seven months.

At 120,000 words, I realized the story needed more space. Four months later, I had both Books 1 and 2 completed.

According to the latest data, Kepler-452 is closer to 1800 light years away, why is it 1400 in your books?

When Kepler-452b was first discovered, the estimate was about 1400 light years. That is the number I started with. The initial version of my book based all the time dilation math and the travel timeline on that distance. Later, I took some artistic license because the warp shield affected the journey and made a one-year travel time fit neatly in a semi-plausible way.

I chose not to go back and change the distance to 1800 light years because my timelines were already set and I did not want to rewrite them. In the end, it became a wink and a nod to the original papers and to the fact that our knowledge is always evolving. We constantly update our understanding of the universe.

So, if you noticed the distance in my books does not match the latest estimate, ask yourself this: how certain are we that the current estimate is correct? They are, after all, still only estimates.

What's next? Will there be a book 3?

Yes, Book 3 is in the works.

I learned a lot writing the first two books, and I like to think my form and flow improved with the second. There is always room for growth, and my goal is to make each new book better than the last.

That said, my production rate has slowed. The original journey to a distant world was the clearest part in my head when I began. Since then, I’ve rewritten outlines, changed my mind on directions, and rethought the paths toward my end goals for the series.

Now that I’m fully immersed in the world I’ve created, there are so many more stories to tell. Beyond continuing John and Morrow’s journey, I want to explore the different colonial outposts of humanity scattered across our corner of the Milky Way. How has centuries of isolation shaped them environmentally, culturally, and politically? Each pocket of humanity offers a chance to explore different facets of who we are.

So no, I haven’t lost momentum. If anything, I’m wrestling with decision paralysis. There is almost too much story to tell. Until I figure out how to slow down time, I’ll just keep chipping away at it one book at a time.