Finding George Washington: A Time Travel Tale by Bill Zarchy

 Please welcome  Bill Zarchy author of Finding George Washington: A Time Travel Tale

Bill Zarchy be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Finding George Washington: A Time Travel Tale 

byBill Zarchy

 

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GENRE:   Sci-Fi / Alternate History / Baseball Saga / Action Thriller

 

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INTERVIEW:

FINDING GEORGE WASHINGTON: A TIME TRAVEL TALE

BY BILL ZARCHY

 

Topic: Author's choice of topic

 

URL:  http://roguesangels.blogspot.com

 

 

 

A Baker’s Dozen of Fun Facts About the Character Tim Morrison in My Debut Novel, Finding George Washington: A Time Travel Tale

 

Please check out my website and blog:

https://findinggeorgewashington.com

https://findinggeorgewashington.com/blog/

 

1.    I knew from the beginning that I wanted Finding George Washington to be narrated in the first person by my protagonist, Tim Morrison. I knew that bringing Washington to the present would be a momentous event, and that George would need someone to talk to about what was going on. Tim would thus serve as a foil, a character whose purpose was to contrast with George.

2.    As I got into writing the story, I realized that Tim also needed someone to talk to about the difficult-to-believe happenings taking place around him, and that’s why I added Tim’s BFF Matt, a foil for my foil. 

3.    Tim is based in part on my younger son Danny, who was in his mid-20s at the time I started writing the book

4.    Like Danny, Tim is tall and loves baseball. 

5.    Like Tim, Danny also loves video games. Around the time I started the book, he was beating an RPG (role-playing game) called Assassin’s Creed 3, which is set during the Revolutionary War. Players can interact with a George Washington character, who becomes crazier and more megalomaniacal as the game progresses. In fact, one feature of the game is called “The Tyranny of King Washington.” At one point in the development of Finding George,I had excerpts from Assassin’s Creed 3 sprinkled through the book. But George’s madness in the game was off point, and the game segments interrupted the flow of my story, so I eventually eliminated them. Tim still plays a Revolutionary War game in my book, but it’s now an imaginary one called Independencethat he plays in the background..

6.    I’m also tall and a baseball lover, and readers sometimes confuse me with Tim. One friend wrote to me recently: “Loving your book!” I asked how much he had read so far, and he responded, “You’re just getting on the train in Davis.” I wrote back with a chuckle, noting that it was Tim boarding the train with his friends, not me. He said, “I know, I know, but I think of Tim as you.” Because we’re both, you know, tall. I guess we all look alike.

7.    Tim was named for ace San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum. 

8.    Tim’s pal LaMatthew Johnson was named after Giants pitcher Matt Cain.

9.    Tim Morrison and Matt Johnson both reside on a street in a neighborhood much like mine. In the book, they live in Berkeley. IRL, I live in a neighboring town, a few blocks from the Berkeley line.

10.  Like Tim and his friends, I took a long train ride during the research phase of Finding George. And we had similar experiences with Amtrak’s poor on-time record. 

11.  Many of the characters Tim meets on the train are based on real people I met on my own trip, with actual names, hometowns and occupations sanitized to protect the innocent.

12.  In the story, Tim’s blind Uncle Chuck is recently deceased. Tim is able to sneak his uncle’s seeing-eye dog Nevada onto a train by feigning blindness himself, something he had played at with his uncle while growing up. I was inspired to develop this idea by hearing about how easy it was for a relative to bring his much-beloved service dog on a plane.

13.  Tim and George and Matt visit a pot-grower friend in the hills of Mendocino, California, and help with his odd-ball project trucking a 40-foot sailboat several miles up narrow, curvy dirt roads to his land. True story! Somewhere in Mendocino, deep in the redwood-and-pine woods, a sailboat named “Dark Star” sits majestically, high atop a mountain. Whether George Washington was inspired by this quixotic project is open to debate.

 

BLURB:

 

On a freezing night in 1778, General George Washington vanishes. Walking away from the Valley Forge encampment, he takes a fall and is knocked unconscious, only to reappear at a dog park on San Francisco Bay—in the summer of 2014.

Washington befriends two Berkeley twenty-somethings who help him cope with the astonishing—and often comical—surprises of the twenty-first century.

Washington’s absence from Valley Forge, however, is not without serious consequences. As the world rapidly devolves around them—and their beloved Giants fight to salvage a disappointing season—George, Tim, and Matt are catapulted on a race across America to find a way to get George back to 1778.

Equal parts time travel tale, thriller, and baseball saga, Finding George Washington is a gripping, humorous, and entertaining look at what happens when past and present collide in the 9th inning, with the bases loaded and no one warming up in the bullpen.

 

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EXCERPT

 

Aurora

 

The General watched as the Northern Lights spread, shimmered, and swirled through the sky like the smoke from God’s own cigar, now rising, now dipping, now twirling and pulsing.

 

Though soldiers often considered the aurora a bad omen, at that moment it thrilled him. To the east, he could see the glow of sentry fires of some of the closer regiments, the troops hunkered down for the night. A short distance to the south, the men of his personal guard occupied their own group of makeshift huts within sight of the farmhouse.

 

It’s cold. I should get back before Patsy and the staff begin to miss me. 

 

He paused and took a deep breath of the night air. He was a durable and determined man who had survived cold and wintry weather during his early life as a surveyor and, later, as a British officer. He would show his Continental Army troops that the cold didn’t bother him, that staying strong was a state of mind. Certainly they had it worse than he did, but they respected that he had refused to move out of his tent into the stone farmhouse until his men moved out of their tattered shelters into log huts.

 

The fluid, ethereal display of light in the skies danced and pulsated. Before he could climb down the hill and head back toward the farmhouse, the ground under his feet began to shake and rumble, providing a steady, geological drumbeat to accompany the green and red light in the sky. The terrain rolled. He lost his footing on the ice, just at a point where a crisp moonbeam seemed to hit the patch of turf he was crossing. 

 

The earth came up to meet him, and he banged his head on the frozen ground. Woozy and lightheaded, teetering on the edge of consciousness, he felt a great sadness, felt the bones in his body melt in the shard of moonlight, even as, in his remaining awareness, he realized the moon was not out that evening. He felt his body scooped off the ground, as if by a vengeful wind, then tumbled in a heap onto something hard and unyielding that swept him along at a great rate of speed. All went dark.

 

 

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

Bill Zarchy filmed projects on six continents during his 40 years as a cinematographer, captured in his first book, Showdown at Shinagawa: Tales of Filming from Bombay to Brazil. Now he writes novels, takes photos, and talks of many things.

 

Bill’s career includes filming three former presidents for the Emmy-winning West Wing Documentary Special, the Grammy-winning Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em, feature films Conceiving Ada and Read You Like A Book, PBS science series Closer to Truth, musical performances as diverse as the Grateful Dead, Weird Al Yankovic, and Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and countless high-end projects for technology and medical companies.

 

His tales from the road, personal essays, and technical articles have appeared in Travelers’ Tales and Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies, the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers, and American Cinematographer, Emmy, and other trade magazines.

 

Bill has a BA in Government from Dartmouth and an MA in Film from Stanford. He taught Advanced Cinematography at San Francisco State for twelve years. He is a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area and a graduate of the EPIC Storytelling Program at Stagebridge in Oakland. This is his first novel.

 

findinggeorgewashington.com

findinggeorgewashington.com/blog

billzarchy.com

 

Paperback:    https://www.amazon.com/dp/0984919120/

Kindle:    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08NXXNLBB/

 

Facebook:    https://www.facebook.com/Finding-George-Washington-A-Time-Travel-Tale-by-Bill-Zarchy-112403433952296

 

 

The book will be $0.99.

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE:

 

Bill Zarchy be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f3808