Today’s special guest is Robin Stevens Payes. We’re chatting about her new young adult time travel novel, Find Me in the Time Before.
Bio:
Robin Stevens Payes is author of the Edge of Yesterday YA time-travel adventure series, and the newest book in the series, Find Me in the Time Before.
She is also a coach and creator of The Mother Daughter Code, a program designed to help mothers of teen girls transform their relationship from friction to joy. She was nominated for Women in Technology’s 2019 Women’s Leadership Award for her work as a STEAM educator.
Welcome, Robin. Please tell us about your current release.
The fourth book of the Edge of Yesterday series, Find Me in the Time Before, picks up after Charley Morton has achieved the impossible: hacking time. After recreating a time machine from Leonardo da Vinci’s blueprints and accidentally sending herself 500 years into the past to meet the Renaissance master himself, she was grateful to return home to the 21st Century safely.
However, after settling back into her normal, everyday routine— navigating high school and her social life— she finds herself longing to meet more of her “heroes of history”. In Find Me in the Time Before, Charley decides she will travel back in time once again to meet one of her greatest scientific role models: Marquise Emilie du Châtelet, a nearly forgotten Enlightenment thinker who laid the foundation for relativity two centuries before Einstein.
With the help of her two closest friends, Billy and Beth, Charley sets out on Halloween night to time-travel again. Things don’t exactly go as planned, though, when Beth goes missing and Charley feels responsible. Charley’s search for her bestie takes her from the plague-infested cemeteries in Paris to duels with royals in Versailles, all the while uncovering secrets of the past that may just change the future as they know it. Find Me in the Time Before will take readers on a heart-pounding romp through history!
What inspired you to write this book?
I always had a sense Edge of Yesterday would become a series. After all, if you were someone who could crack the spacetime barrier and come back alive, wouldn’t you want to see where you could go, who you would meet, and what amazing events you might witness?
So, as I was writing the first three books, Edge of Yesterday, Da Vinci’s Way, and Saving Time, which comprise the Leonardo da Vinci sequence, I was also thinking about where Charley would want to go next, now that there’s nothing to keep her at home in the 2020s. As a Renaissance girl-wannabe, she wants to learn the secrets of geniuses throughout history!
I was watching a documentary—a biography of the equation E=mc2, based on a book of the same title by David Bodanis. It’s where I first heard about this fabulous mathematician, philosopher and physicist of Enlightenment France, Emilie, the Marquise du Châtelet. A woman, laying the foundation for Relativity two centuries before Einstein! This sent me down the rabbit hole to find out more about her, and to see what else this polymath may have innovated.
What I found out about her life was eye-opening! In 1736, she was the first woman to win a prize by the French Royal Academy of Science (albeit anonymously) for her Essay on the Nature of Fire. She translated Sir Isaac Newton’s work into French, then improved on his Laws of Gravity. She dueled and gambled (counting cards with her uncanny math ability), besting ladies and men alike at Versailles as a mere teenager. She was the consort of the great satirist, Voltaire, and acted in his plays, sang his operas, and collaborated with him on original science experiments. They ran a salon together that attracted some of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers from around Europe.
That was just the beginning for this “daring woman of the Enlightenment,” as one of her modern biographers dubbed her. As a woman who believed women should be recognized for their achievements and who lived a rather scandalous life, her legacy is only now being restored.
Excerpt from Find Me in the Time Before:
They make you leave backpacks and phones and stuff at the arching black wrought-iron gates to Rock Creek Cemetery. That would make me feel naked enough, but I’ve also got my corduroys and t-shirt stuffed in there. I mean, it’s Halloween so, to get in, they make you wear a costume.
I’ve got on my Emilie costume, of course. Which, at the time, I thought would be a hoot. But now I’m thinking the whole idea might’ve been a big mistake. First, the humiliation of the high school Halloween dance, to which I unsuspectingly made a grand entrance walking in during the middle of the principal’s speech where I suffered the slow claps and stares hoots of “Char-ley! Char-ley!” under the evil eye of Principal Norton.
“…Uh-mazing…”
“Really… incredible…”
“That hair… so, um… bouffant!”
Oblivious, Beth’s beaming the whole time because, of course, she designed it: dress, wig, and all.
As for me, I was mainly intent on not tripping over the hem of my long, Cinderella-like gown and further humiliating myself.
The potential for tripping seems far worse out here. But at least I don’t have to wear that hideous wig.
“This is so freaky!” I whisper, my skin crawling under the voluminous petticoats and hoops. I’m thinking of turning on the heat element against the cold outside, but I haven’t really tested it yet, and I don’t dare blow the thing up while I’m wearing it.
Beth’s response is the crunch and cackle from a bag of Doritos she brought along. “What?!” she says when I turn to see what she’s up to. “Hungry!”
I sigh. The stupid farthingale (and whose brilliant fashion invention was that, I wonder, irrelevantly) keeps snagging on bushes and gravestones. Which is scary enough. It’s wide enough that, if I turned it around, it would make the perfect tray to eat off of.
Imagine, I’m creeping through a graveyard that holds the ghosts of Washingtonians from way before the American Revolution—no less than Supreme Court justices and Civil War generals—and where somebody’s had the novel idea to set up a Halloween haunted forest. Like an actual graveyard could lack for spookiness.
Beth, a.k.a, Wonder Woman, trails behind me. She had the brilliant foresight (not!) to wear boots with those little heels—like the old TV Wonder Woman—to the haunted forest, and her heels keep sinking into the mud that lurks beneath a blanket of wet leaves, where the grass has disappeared. Pulling her boots out of that suck-swamp keeps her panting several paces behind me.
“Whose idea was this stupid costume anyway?” she asks self-mockingly, clasping her cape in front to cover bare shoulders.
“Told you to add in sleeves and the heating element, like mine,” I observe.
“Yeah. Well. Anyway.” It’s as close as Beth can come to acknowledging I’m right.
The full moon casts weird shadows among the trees, and I hear a hoot-owl in the distance. The leaves crunch and squish under our footsteps, and my long skirt swooshes them around. Despite these sounds, it is eerily silent.
I try to keep a conversation going, mainly to dispel my nerves.
“It’s not like Billy to miss this, Beth. Halloween is, like, his favorite holiday.”
Mine too. You have no idea how many babysitting hours I had to put in to get out of taking the twins trick-or-treating. Even though they begged me. And they did look totes adorbs in their little Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee costumes (a Disneyfied version, not like those strange Alice in Wonderland drawings). More like squishy balloons bouncing off each other.
“I’m sure your boyfriend will be here soon, Charley.” Beth sounds confident, but I’m not so sure.
I duck under a branch from a fallen tree limb that serves as a portal to the section of the cemetery that has been cordoned off for this “experience” and brush off a spider web. I’m kind of surprised they’d let anyone enter here who wasn’t visiting like, you know, a deceased relative or something. And especially not for an event like this. Suddenly, I hear diabolical cackling, like a troupe of scary clowns might be mocking us, echoing through speakers overhead and all around.
“Omigod, what was that?” Beth takes quick steps on tiptoe to catch up.
“Sounded like scary clowns to me.”
“I hate clowns!” she replies. Which has been true her whole life.
“What are we doing here, Charley? And where’s everybody else?”
It’s a good question.
A whoosh of wind sweeps through the rows of gravestones, whispering echoes of my last experience in a cemetery—with Leonardo da Vinci about to dig up a fresh grave to examine the corpse. “Bright girl that you are,” I hear Leo saying, “I thought this place might interest you. From a medical point-of-view, that is.”
Fat chance of any anatomy lessons here. First off, grave robbing is a crime. Second off, today we have other ways to examine the inner workings of human bodies, non-invasively and very much alive, as it were.
And third off, ZOMBIES.
“What the hell?!” screams Beth.
An actual zombie has dropped in front of us. Well, I mean, someone playing a zombie, arms stretched and walking stiffly towards us, like you’d see in a bad B-movie.
I giggle as Beth turns to me, her eyes wide.
“Hey, Z! How’s it goin’?” I ask in a too-loud voice. “Wanna dance?”
I hold out my arms, like I’m gonna slow dance with the thing, but when the zombie looks confused, I just start laughing uncontrollably.
A voice behind me whispers into my ear.
“Cache-cache, Charlotte!”
The voice brings me up cold. “Wait, who knows my name?”
I turn my head, but no one’s there, and when I look back, even the zombie seems to have melted back into the shadows. Or behind a haystack for a costume change.
Another whoosh of air overhead kicks up a mini-cyclone of leaves, straw and debris, and a spider drops in front of me.
“Beth?” my voice sounds too shrill.
“Cache-cache!” the voice repeats. A panicked flutter of wings brushes my hair and I hear the screech of a crow.
“Very funny, Beth,” I say as confidently as I can, ducking away. But the only answer is the susurrus of wind rushing through what few leaves cling to skeleton branches.
No Beth in sight.
Then, footsteps and a . . . something else . . . crunching through leaves. It’s coming closer. I try to run, but my hem is mired in mud and weighing me down. Things no one tells you about old-style dresses!
I freeze in place. Two long, icy hands close over my eyes.
“Boo!”
My heart’s beating out of my chest. “Billy?”
What exciting story are you working on next?
Charley’s appetite to uncover the secrets of “hidden” female polymaths is growing! In the next book, she’s on to a new adventure that will take her back 100 years to Jazz-Age New York during the Harlem Renaissance.
Not to mention, she will soon be heading off to college. How will the past intersect with her life in 2023—and influence her future, or the world as we know it? At this point in the story, it’s anybody’s guess. Suffice it to say, whatever the adventure, it’s going to be the bee’s knees!
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I was a French major in college and studied in Strasbourg, France, for my Junior and Senior year. French follows defined rules of grammar, unlike English, where every rule has 100 exceptions (or so it sometimes seems!). While living in Strasbourg, I practiced my French by keeping a daily journal. Through my journaling, I began to see how mastering these rules could provide a framework that might allow me the freedom to express myself creatively.
That’s when I first began to think of myself as a writer. In graduate school, I interned in television public affairs, and started freelancing stories for magazines and newspaper (in English). My first real job was as a copywriter for an ad agency. It was then that I realized I was, at heart, a writer.
I started writing books many years later—after career, marriage, kids, and realizing I needed a creative challenge to keep my inner life alive. It is a much different challenge, but I love it!
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
In addition to my fiction writing, I offer writing and creativity workshops, internships and programs. I’ve been focused on teaching students how to apply storytelling to different forms of media— as of late, we’ve honed in on content marketing and social media. We use various platforms, like the Edge of Yesterday blog, Instagram, and TikTok, to promote their stories. It’s really fun working with GenZ creatives; they’re also teaching me in the process!
Edge of Yesterday is notably a multimedia project: In addition to the book series, I have created an online, interactive “learning through story” platform at https://edgeofyesterday.com. At Edge of Yesterday, we introduce young people to the art and science of interdisciplinary learning. It is a creative, immersive online experience where teens can explore various time periods alongside the series’ protagonist and meet Charley’s “heroes of history.”
When not offering workshops, programs and the internship, I am writing full-time now. I’m a morning person, so that’s when I get my best work done. When I’m in serious writing mode, it is my practice to get up early, walk the dog, get a big cup of coffee and buckle down around 8 AM so I can wrap up around Noon.
But that doesn’t mean the process stops there. I may be working through a problem with plot or character that doesn’t come to me in the moment, or that doesn’t work. If I step away and put that in the back of my mind, often the “eureka” will come when I’m doing something else: washing dishes, driving to the grocery store, or in the shower. It used to be, before we had notes on our phones, that it would come to me and I wouldn’t have paper and pen handy, so I’d write on my hand. It was the one place I knew I wouldn’t lose the thought.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
When I get stuck in my writing—writer’s block—I sing (and sometimes dance) along to Broadway musicals. When you think about it, the lyrics to the greatest shows are masterpieces of wordplay and storytelling. It gets the creative juices flowing again!
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an actress. I studied acting in college and did summer stock before realizing that the person who writes the words has more power than the person reciting them on stage. One of my next projects is to take the Edge of Yesterday series from “page-to-stage” by working on a screenplay adaptation.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I take the Edge of Yesterday adventures beyond the page, working with teens through workshops, programs and a six-week summer internship to set off on their own journey of discovery. I call it a stealthy way to advance STEM and STEAM learning through creativity. By training them in a style of narrative journalism, they can have their original stories published at the Edge of Yesterday through our interactive Time Travelers portal.
What I’ve learned along the way is that there’s also a desire to advance the tools of creativity—communication, curiosity, problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration—among their parents. To facilitate that, I’ve created The Mother-Daughter Code to work with moms of teen girls. It’s a program that gives parents the space, the time, the tools, and the permission to take some time for self-reflection, to question whether the stories we are stuck in are still true for us—or vestiges of an old reality. Society—with our FOMO, our overbooked lives, and the constant stream of messages we get, on social media, on TV, and from our families and friends that we’re not good enough—really doesn’t give us permission for that.
Over this past year, I’ve designed an online program that shares the lessons I’ve learned as a mom writing at the Edge of Yesterday. It combines science and creativity by integrating concepts from psychology and developmental neuroscience that I’ve written about as a science writer and providing insights into how our stories shape us.
With the teen years often being a fraught period for both the teens themselves and the parents, I aim to give busy mothers, especially, a playbook that will help them work through challenges that arise in their relationship, and to help transform negative interactions into a more joyful life together.
I’ll be launching The Mother Daughter Code in 2023. I invite anyone who might be curious to take a peek at what this new program, redefining the mother and teen daughter dynamic, holds in store!