Dragon Soul Press took the opportunity to interview Paulene Turner, an author featured in Pirate Gold and Reign of Queens.

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1. Introduce yourself.
   • I’m Paulene Turner, an Australian writer of fiction: short stories, short plays and novels.
2. How many projects do you have planned over the next few years? Tell us about one.
   • I’m currently midway through releasing my 6-book YA time travel series, The Time Travel Chronicles. The series took me over a decade to write, took my characters to five historical periods plus the future, and required over 500,000 words! My mother always said I could talk underwater (actually, I can, but that’s another story), but not even I thought I had all those words in me.
     What’s the story? Two Aussie teens travel through history in a time machine. Their first stop is Ancient Egypt, where they mean to observe but not interact with too many people. Because…time travel. But when a local girl invites them to stay in her family home, they’re drawn into local dramas and can’t resist using their future knowledge to help. And the rest…is no longer history.
     So they travel fifteen years into the future to find the Point of Origin of their troubles, hoping that by rewinding the strands of cause and effect, they can set the world’s timeline back on course. Do they manage it? You’ll have to read the books to find out. I released the first three books in 2023 and the final three come out by November 2024!
     Which is why they travel again in book 2 to medieval England, to fix a few timeline issues. But the timeline is like a tent you buy at Walmart. Once you get it out of its box, it never goes back in in quite the same way. So, they travel in book 3, to the Wild West, book 4 to the Caribbean in a time when pirates stalked the seas, and book 5 to Edo Japan. They meant to fix the timeline but each new trip causes new problems requiring still more trips to fix them. Until, by book 6, the world is like a cheese grate with people from different historical periods falling through the holes to times not their own.
3. What is your writing process like?
   • I’m a plantser…a mix of plotter and pantser. I like to have a rough idea where I’m going with key points on a map I know I have to get to. But then I let my characters meander along and discover things on the way, like walking along the beach and picking up shells.
     I have a unique way of approaching stories, which I learnt from my daughters. I “cast” my characters first, with actors that have the right look and attitude, and make a cast list. I also put things like period clothing and any particular features. It’s a shorthand way to discover who they are.
     I was a screenwriter before I began writing narrative fiction. I have the discipline of ensuring each scene has a purpose—sometimes a double purpose, not just progressing the tale but also deepening the character. And I’ve learned to tell a story through dialogue and action alone. So my stories tend to be filmic, with a lot of “in the moment” scenes. I sometimes overdo the dialogue and have to self-consciously insert more summary writing to create the feel of a novel or a narrative story rather than a script.
4. Where do you draw inspiration from?
   • My favourite writer is Robin Hobb. I love her Farseer series and the Liveship Traders. They’re dense and immersive with some characters you can’t take your eyes off, like Fitz, the royal bastard, and the Fool. And Kennit, a pirate with shades of grey to black. Her prose is succinct and elegant.
5. What do you hope readers enjoy most from your work?
   • I hope my readers have an immersive experience, so they feel the dust catch in the back of their throat in an Ancient Egyptian tomb, a sword’s sting in a battle in medieval England, wind in their hair and salt on their lips in a storm at sea. I hope they feel things—tension and romance—but also that they laugh. I feel that humour is a powerful way to deliver the meaning in a story.
6. What is one goal you have for your writing future?
   • A goal for my writing future. I’m very keen that this series isn’t my last work. I’d like to write a mystery series set in Victorian England with Irene Adler as the main character. I love the Sherlock Holmes stories. And I always adore a clever thinker in a piece. Imagine a character as switched on as Sherlock, who’s a woman in that time. Imagine what she’d be up against, how she’d be underestimated and what sort of things—good or bad—she’d be able to do as a result. Who knows whether it will happen. But it all begins with imagining, doesn’t it.