I used to tell ghost stories to my kids and their cousins when the families stayed together. I centered them around historic events or people who caught my fancy, such as Sarah Bernhardt’s lost diamond, the wreck of a steamer called S.S. Huron, or the tragic death of Rosalie Rayner. Well, time travel is a lot like a ghost story— an eerie communion with people who are no longer there— so why not try that?

I’ve always been drawn to the 1870s (see previous post, My Favorite Period), and that decade furnished plenty of ideas (See Inspirations post). Because I was telling the story to kids, the lead character was naturally going to be a kid: A girl like I knew, fourteen-year-old Susan Ferguson had spent some time helping out her historian Gramp, and among other things learned enough about the 1870s to know that she’d be terrified to live then. What would it be like for her to suddenly be shoved onto the streets of Manhattan in 1872? And what if she herself was being shoved into adolescence, just when she’d gotten good at being a kid?

As I repeated the story it seemed to grow legs. I’d run across Jack Finney’s time travel novel, Time and Again, and that classic tale became my model. Since then I’ve read many accounts of journeys back in time, but they have rarely immersed their travelers in the bygone world, making them adapt to historical lifestyles for a span of weeks or months. (Wonderful exceptions are Kate Saunders’ Beswitched, and Jennifer Donnelly’s Revolution.) The most important skill for time travelers, I realized, was to pass for normal among time-foreigners, and to avoid panic when disaster looms.

Before I knew it Beyond Australia was a book, and had actually grown too long for the Young Adult market. But its main problem, agents told me, was some unacceptable behavior by teens—visiting a saloon, falling for a somewhat older man, and especially the main male character’s signature habit of smoking cigars. However, by this time I could almost hear their voices, and I decided that my characters were who they were. I would join the trend toward self-publishing. As for the length, I learned the painful art of “killing your darlings” from an excellent editor at Reedsy, Antonia Reed, and produced a better book. Maybe I’ll put some of the out-takes in a later post.