Behind The Story The Time Warriors When Angels Burn

By and copyright of Owen Quinn

Any writer will tell you that the germ of an idea often turns into something completely different. Also, that you may have a germ of an idea but it may take a while to put it into a coherent story. This was the case with When Angels Burn.

It was going to be called Curse of Lake Damon. It was something my son had an idea about as a child. Damon means demon in German. He envisioned a dark lake with creatures made of mist rising from the surface. This sayed with me for a few years before I began to put it all together.

As a Time Warriors story, it would go either the supernatural way or the sci fi way. I then got an idea of a young woman in a rowing boat at night who suddenly dissolves when a strange whispering reaches a crescendo. So I had a whispering lake, ghosts in the woods and there wa no other way round it, there was something alien at the bottom of the lake. I had two other ideas; a young mute boy screaming out in the night and a Persian kid sitting on a frozen vista before a floating fire. A figure approaches him and hands him what looks like a Doubloon and tells him “When Angels Burn.”

I needed a way in different from the usual stumbling into or being dragged into a story. This time I used Rachel’s fake memories given to her by the Ganti when they made her human as a doorway. What if Rachel had memories of this boy and the whispering lake? But she only had fragments so that was the central mystery.

So many images and ideas but how to put them all together? Little did I know that it would become a story about loss and grief for both bumans and Xerebans.

it wasn’t until I saw the image of the alien, the Galantufeen, my most exotic named alien to date and then it all fell into place.

Writing a series like the Time Warriors, you begin to develop your own universe and mythos. So the chance to bring Xereba back into the story was impossible to resist. It was also a chance to reaffirm the Time Warriors as a team and expand on them all as characters. I liked the Vienna backdrop as you want to see the world.

But I fear I have said too much. If you want to see how it all comes together check out The Time Warriors When Angels Burn & Other Stories now on sale on Amazon in both paperback and kindle.