Eric R Johnston at Children of Time Blog Tour 

World Castle Publishing


Can you tell us about Children of Time?
Children of Time is a dark fantasy, sci-fi novel that deals with timeline manipulation. It starts with a prologue that is to show life for one of the main characters before the events in the story. Whether there really is a before comes into question throughout the novel, but for Shawna, she had survived an abusive marriage after killing her husband in self-defense.
After a nightmare six years later, Shawna’s young daughter, Alexis, comes to sleep with her. She had dreamed of a time when she died. It was so real to her. Shawna thinks nothing of it, but allows Alexis to sleep with her.
What happens next sets the story exploding into an action-packed thrill ride. Shawna wakes to find Alexis gone and a strange man in her bed. The man is as confused as she is, knowing that he’s dead, or should be.

What could be happening?
Well that is for, reader, to find out.

What was your inspiration for the story and the writing process?
The story actually came from two different places.
After completing A Light in the Dark, I began a novel I called Temporal Winter. The title came from a play on the phrase “nuclear winter,” which describes a particularly bad outcome of a nuclear war. This story was about a war between time periods instead of nations. In the distant future, humans develop “temporal weapons” that have the ability to erase people or events from history. The novel opened up with a temporal attack on the present.
This was an idea that had been brought up in several science fiction outlets, but I hadn’t seen anyone do much with it. Sometime, as a writer, if there’s a story I want to read and I can’t find it, I’ll write it myself.
The novel just was not working. Maybe it was too difficult, or maybe I couldn’t stop thinking about the how the fate of the villain of A Light in the Dark was left pretty ambiguous. I kept thinking about the dark world he’d been exiled to…thinking about what he was doing there. So I decided to write another novel that I called City of Evil.
The problem I ran into with City of Evil was I didn’t have enough story for a full-length novel, and what I had served better a back story to something better anyway. So I put it that aside and began working on Temporal Winter again. Then it dawned on me that these were actually two parts of the same story, that it was really the demon in the dark world affecting time, not humans from the future.

Children of Time ties into An Inner Darkness and A Light in the Dark, but is intended to be read as a stand-alone novel.

When did you realize you wanted to write?
The first time I think I consciously thought about it was when I was 10 years old. That was when I wrote my first story.  I was really into the Goosebumps books, which were very popular at the time, and I wanted to write stories just like those. I continued to write through the years, earning the praise of teachers and University professors, before setting my mind to write a novel in 2009. That first novel was Harvester: Ascension, a book that turned out better than I could ever have imagined.

Do you have anything in the works now?
I have many things in the works, but I will only list two. I am working on the sequel to 9111 Sharp Road called In the Pale Moonlight. This series is about a town overrun by vampires and ghosts from another world.
I am also working on book that deals with suicide in an interesting way. I can’t comment much on it because it is still in its planning stages, but I will say anyone who reads it will never look at life the same way again. The title for that one is All I Want in Life…

What hobbies do you have outside of writing?
I like working out, walking running, reading, and watching TV shows online. I am currently watching Battlestar Gallactica, and I’m uber excited for the final episodes of Breaking Bad and the final season of Dexter.
Additionally, I am an English and Social Studies teacher and an editor.

What would you like the readers to ask of you?
My mind drifts to L. Frank Baum, whose fans were so into The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, that they demanded he write more and more and more books detailing that world. I would love to have a similar reaction and request concerning the world I created in An Inner Darkness and A Light in the Dark. I would love one day to revisit, see how things are going, and report back to my readers.