Author Spotlight: Andrew Cunningham

Andrew’s giveaway winners are Roseann Brooks and Kimberly Field! Andrew will be in touch. Thanks to everyone who stopped by–hope you’re all looking forward to a time travel adventure with the Yestertime series!  

Confession? I did something I think I’ve only done one other time in my life–I fan-girled an author! Yup, I loved Andrew Cunningham’s time travel series Yestertime so much, I contacted him, told him how much I loved it, and invited him to come chat with me on the Author Spotlight. He very graciously agreed. Interviewing Andrew was just as fascinating and fun as I knew it would be, and I’m so excited to introduce you to him today.

Andrew Cunningham is the author of novels in several genres, including, mystery, thriller, time travel, and post-apocalyptic science fiction. Under the name A.R. Cunningham, He’s also written the Arthur MacArthur series of mysteries for children.

Born in England, he has lived in the U.S. most of his life. Growing up in different areas of the country has helped inspire many of the settings he uses in his books.

His professional life has been rewarded with wonderful experiences, beginning as an interpreter for the deaf. As a long-time former resident of Cape Cod, he was an independent bookseller for over 20 years and a writer for numerous magazines. he is grateful to have been involved in the training and teachings of martial arts, achieving the rank of 4th-degree master black belt in Tang Soo Do.

​Andrew loves hearing from readers, so please feel free to contact him.

Website | Facebook | Amazon Author Page

N: Welcome to the blog, Andrew. I’m so pleased to have you with me today. So, what inspired you to start writing?

A: Thank you for having me, Nan! It’s nice to be here. I was a voracious reader as a child. One of the middle-grade series I read (in addition to The Hardy Boys and countless others) was Freddy the Pig, by Walter R. Brooks. He wrote 26 books in the series from the 1920s until his death in the 1950s. So, by the time I was reading them in the 1960s, the series was already complete. In my mind, there needed to be more. I was determined to continue the series, and I spent many hours into my teens trying to recreate his unique style. Needless to say, there are still only 26 books in the series, but the exercise convinced me of my calling.

N: You are an incredibly prolific writer, having written something like 20 books spanning four series in several different genres, including thrillers, mysteries, post-apoc sci-fi, and time travel. You’ve also written a series of middle-grade novels. What is the most surprising thing you discovered about yourself while writing your books?

A: Maybe my ability to focus. It’s so easy to find other things to do when you’re supposed to be writing, things that you would avoid like the plague any other time—doing the dishes, cleaning the house, or taking the car for an oil change. In my early days of writing, I did a lot of dreaming about getting books published, but very little writing. I had to teach myself to focus. And it’s become a very simple concept for me: If I don’t write, the book doesn’t get finished!

N: Today, I’d really like focus on your time travel series, Yestertime. That’s where I met you—I read the first book in the series, Yestertime, and was so intrigued, I immediately nabbed the other three books in the series for my Kindle and read them literally in less than a week. What inspired you to write time travel stories?

A: One minor scene in the Stephen King TV miniseries 11/22/63. Back to that in a moment… I’ve only read one time travel book in my life, and that was about thirty years ago. It was Jack Finney’s Time and Again. A wonderful book! I loved the movie The Time Machine and the TV series Time Tunnel, but other than those, I’d had little contact with the subject. It had never occurred to me to write time travel. In 11/22/63, the main character, having traveled back to 1963, throws his iPhone off a bridge into the river. It was probably a pretty forgettable scene to most viewers, but my immediate thought was: What if someone found it years later? That simple thought was the inspiration. Of course, in Yestertime, there was no iPhone and no river. Instead, there was an old trunk dating back 150 years found in a cave near an Arizona ghost town. The trunk included a note that read “I’m going to die a hundred years before I was born,” and contained something that shouldn’t have been in the 150-year-old trunk. Once I had that idea, the story just took off.

N: The time portals were a fabulous device, and I loved how the travelers didn’t know until they got there, whether a portal would still be available or where it would empty out at the other end of the journey. How did you decide on the specific time periods your characters, particularly hero Ray Burton, traveled to, and what significance do those periods hold for the plots of the books in the series?

A: The characters were dealing with the challenge of being lost in time. But the time portals were all one-way, so it wasn’t just a case of walking back into the portal and returning home. It became a puzzle that had to be put together to find the correct series of portals that “might” get them home. It meant visiting various periods in time to accomplish that. Some were periods that had always interested me, and some were periods and events that needed extra research. I’ve always been interested in the old American west, the Civil War, and WW2. But I knew nothing about France in the 1700s, and not nearly enough about WW1. And sometimes I just had a little fun with it. My mother lived in London during the war (where she met my father, who was an American B-24 bombardier stationed in England). Ray Burton finds himself in England during the war at one point and helps save a family stuck in their bomb shelter after an air raid. I modeled that family after my mother’s family. Another time, for fun, I had a character find refuge in a movie theater in 1960. The movie playing was The Time Machine.

N: What was the most challenging aspect of writing time travel stories? How did you overcome those hurdles?

A: The most challenging aspect was not getting confused! The portals were one-way. I had to make sure I didn’t have someone going the wrong way. The other challenge was making sure I was correct when I wrote about a time period. I had to do a lot of research, even for those periods that I was pretty knowledgeable about. Were my facts correct? Did I represent the era correctly? To overcome all the hurdles, I had to read over the manuscripts many times until I was absolutely certain everything was correct.

N: Do you believe that time travel stories offer unique opportunities to address current issues through a historical lens? For instance, I was fascinated that the people from the distant future were so taken with how green the earth was, which I thought was an interesting commentary on climate change.

A: I think any book that deals with historical events can be looked at as a way to see current events. In most cases, it’s a way to look at things we shouldn’t repeat. In the case of one traveler from the future landing in the 1960s, I tried to imagine what the world a hundred years from now could be like. Most likely, it would be overcrowded and overbuilt. There wouldn’t be a lot of green, and food would be even more processed than it is today. So the thought of someone seeing the colors and tasting “real” food for the first time struck my imagination.

N: I was interested in Ray’s personal growth and development throughout the series as well as the other characters’ arcs. How did the time travel impact that?

A: I had never entertained writing a time travel book, so I was coming at the subject with no experience in the genre. Oddly enough, I think it turned out to be a good thing. When Yestertime was published, a lot of readers and reviewers said they liked it because it was a different take on time travel, focusing more on the emotional and physical toll that time travel inflicted on the travelers. I honestly hadn’t even thought of that as I wrote the book. But as I looked back, I realized how hard the struggles of time travel were on the characters. It really did take a toll on them. That gave me a focus for the other books in the series. It was so easy for some characters to finally give up the struggle. In Ray’s case, the hurdles only made him stronger and more self-reliant. But then, Ray, having been a war correspondent, was more prepared than most.

N: And now for a few sort of personal questions because readers love to know more us beyond our writing life: What do you like to do when you are not writing?

A: Traveling. I spent my childhood moving from state to state. From it I developed the travel bug. I’m able to use a lot of my experiences having lived in or traveled to different places in my books. First-hand knowledge of an area makes the writing that much easier and convincing.

N: If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

A: When it comes to goals, don’t waste time! Just go for it. Don’t be afraid of failure.

N: What did you want to be when you grew up?

A: A writer. I knew it from an early age. I would have also enjoyed being a meteorologist, as I love weather events. But I wasn’t a great student and never did well in science, which kind of nixed the idea of meteorology. But extreme weather shows up in a few of my other books, so I was able to make some use of my interest, after all.

N: Favorite book when you were a kid?

A: I already mentioned the Freddy the Pig books. If you’ve never heard of them, check them out. They appeal to adults, as well as children. Overlook Press has reprinted them all. But I think if I had to pick one book, it would be Pilot Down, Presumed Dead, by Marjorie Phleger, about a man who crash lands his small plane on an island in the Galapagos. I loved the descriptions of his struggles to stay alive.

N: Are you working on anything at the present you would like to tell our readers about?

A: I just published Maui Lies, the 8th book in my “Lies” Mystery Thriller Series. I’m working on the 4th book in my Alaska Thrillers Series. This is kind of challenging to me because I’m trying to throw in a sort of Jules Verne”ish” flavor. It has also required me to do a little science (ugh) research. When it’s finished though, it should be fun. When this is done, I plan to write a 5th Yestertime book and the long-overdue 5th book in my Eden Rising Post-Apocalyptic Series. The only problem with writing several series is deciding what to write next!

N: Finally, this is my favorite question to ask my guests: If you could choose three people, living or dead, to invite to a dinner party, who would they be and why?

A: That’s a tough one. Probably Stephen King. He’s an amazing writer with a fantastic imagination. I’d love to ask him how he can pump out so many brilliant books so quickly! Dick Van Dyke, a comic genius and, from what I hear, a really good person. Finally, of course, Walter R. Brooks (who, btw, also created the famous talking horse, Mr. Ed in a series of magazine short stories). After all, I would love to thank the person who became my writing inspiration.

Giveaway: Andrew is offering two lucky commenters a signed print copy of Yestertime. Just let him know in the comments below what time in history you’d love to go visit. Not forever, you can come back to the 21st century if you want to. (US readers only.)

Yestertime

“I’m going to die a hundred years before I was born…”

The handwritten note was in a dusty trunk that sat in a cave untouched for 150 years. What did the words mean? When journalist Ray Burton finds the trunk near the Arizona ghost town of Hollow Rock, his life changes in an instant.

Something in the trunk shouldn’t be there.

This begins a dangerous journey of discovery bordering on the impossible. A discovery that will affect the past, the present, and the future.

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