A friend's young daughter once asked me if I remembered dinosaurs.
I didn't know if I was supposed to feel offended or flattered, but in the spirit of looking at the world through a half-full glass, I figured she was paying me a compliment, so I converted my fossil-vintage lore into prose.
My reptilian connection remains strong. My wife sometimes calls me a brontosaurus (this is her portrait of me, BTW). The first story I ever wrote as a kid was about time travel and hunting prehistoric beasts, an episode that inspired the scene with young Max and little Vera in "The Extrasense." And finally, most music that I listen to belongs to a long-gone era. Begin the list with the Beatles and the Zombies and end somewhere around Dire Straits and Depeche Mode.
This is me.
Where did the characters in "The Extrasense" come from?
I grew up in the Soviet Union. That alone should give you a hint about the possible origins of Max, Anya, Vera, Petrovich, and the whole gang that haunt the pages of "The Extrasense." However, please don't assume that any of them existed like I wrote them. Every character is a composite image, a blend of real people I met when I was coming of age. Every single character in "The Extrasense" gathered the dust of time sprinkled around the corners of my memory and congealed into live flesh on its own free will. It was fun watching their development as I wrote, because I couldn't recognize some of them in the final draft.
Whenever an author writes in first person, and especially when the protagonist is a writer as well, readers wonder if that is the author's self-insert. All I can say is this: Max shared some life experiences with me (I'm not telling you which). However, Max isn't me, even though I temporarily became him when I wrote "The Extrasense." Whenever Max wanted to steal my own personality trait, I allowed him but kept score (he paid dearly for this).
Of course, I invented all names and locations to preserve anonymity. Even the city isn't mentioned. Funny that all Soviet cities had streets with the same names, so I didn't have to make them up. Like every American town will have its Broadway and Main Street, every Soviet city had Lenin Street, Communist Avenue, and Karl Marx Square.
Meet my characters
Becky and Jake
Believe it or not, but the inspiration for this couple came from Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe. I watched "Anne with an E," which was unfortunately discontinued after Season 3. At some point, I started to write a sequel in my head. The original series by L.M. Montgomery ends with "Rilla of Ingleside," a sad story about the Blythe family during the Great War. I wondered what would have happened if some random guy dropped in from the future and saved them from the horrors of war. A dozen iterations later, Becky and Jake assumed literary flesh and blood in "Point of Return," but they were so grand that I could no longer cram them into one novel. More scribbling followed. My laptop keyboard suffered. Some keys failed. The result was "Return of Angel," but even then, Becky and Jake refused to let go of me, keeping me awake at night. Character demands are the author's sacred law. Thus, "Angel of Time" was born (not fully born yet—I'm still writing), and with it, Becky and Jake will arrive at the finish line.