Excerpt

Introduction to Time Travel Holidays

Trust The Writers

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Right after the invitation for this anthology went out to writers, I thought I had made a mistake. Even though I was contacting amazingly good professional writers, most of whom had awards and bestselling books to their names, I had a feeling that only a handful would be able to pull off what I needed.

What did I need? I needed an excellent time travel story, set during the winter holidays. I knew right away that there would be two things that would trip up even the best writers.

The first was the time travel mechanism. Too many writers get caught up in figuring out their way to discuss time travel, so in the guidelines, I told the writers to give the mechanism no more than a paragraph or two. I wanted to nip this problem in the bud. I didn't want to read pages and pages of well-written material about wormholes and alternate universes.

The second thing that might trip up writers was the mix of genres. Time travel is what I call an umbrella genre. You can write any kind of story you want, from mystery to romance, in a time travel story, so long as the story has time travel as an integral part of the plot.

I gave the writers one more challenge. The holiday also had to be an integral part of the plot.

I figured maybe one or two writers would do well, and everyone else would give me some weird version of Dickens's "A Christmas Carol." And, to be honest, I did get a few standard Christmas stories in which some unpleasant person learned how to be pleasant, not because of visiting ghosts, but because time travel let them see their future.

You won't find any of those stories here.

Instead, what you will find are the most amazing stories I've ever purchased for the Holiday Spectacular.

And now it's time for me to back up and explain what the Holiday Spectacular is. It's a project of the heart for me, something I have wanted to do for a few decades, and finally WMG Publishing (and some great Kickstarter backers) enabled me to do so.

The Holiday Spectacular itself has five parts. It has a Calendar of Stories, three anthologies, and a compilation volume. I tend to focus most on the Calendar of Stories, which is this: we send an original story to subscribers every day between American Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November to New Year's Day. Think of it as a secular (and exceptionally long) advent calendar filled with short fiction.

Each story has to be in one of three genres—romance, mystery, and a surprise category that I pick fresh every year. This year's surprise was time travel. Then we compile a romance anthology, a mystery anthology, and the surprise anthology—which this year is the one you hold in your hands.

All three anthologies have eleven stories, which means the Calendar of Stories has thirty-three stories from some of the best writers in the world. Dean Wesley Smith and I make up the remaining empty spaces. (Some years there are two empty spaces, and some years—like 2022—there are six.) To get the entire Calendar of Stories in one easy-to-read e-book, you have to buy the compilation volume.

The volume for 2022, The Holiday Spectacular #4, appeared in July of 2023. If you only want a certain genre, like mystery, then pick up Crooked Little Christmas (which has stories other than Christmas stories) or Candy Cane Kisses.

Time Travel Holidays has a mix of genres, as I was saying above. But each story contains a specific holiday. I let writers pick their holiday, or they could make up a holiday. The key, though, was that the holiday had to be essential to the story, just like time travel was.

Mixing genres, creating credible time travel, and writing about a holiday? Only spectacular writers could pull that off—and lo and behold, I found eleven writers who were more than up to the challenge.

Let's talk holidays first. These stories feature holidays from Thanksgiving to…Saturnalia. Seriously. The ancient Roman holiday at year's end. Of course, there is an actual New Year's Eve story, and a Christmas Eve story, as well as stories featuring solstice.

And then there is the made-up holiday, credible and somewhat sad, courtesy of Robert Jeschonek. His story is the last one in the volume because there is no other story like it…in all of history and all of time, which means there is no story like it in this anthology either.

Usually, when I put an anthology together, I put one of the stronger stories first—often a story that gives readers a hint of what's to come. Then I make sure that there's another super strong story in the middle, to keep readers interested, and I end with a story so strong that I want readers to search for another volume of stories that I edited.

Any one of the stories in Time Travel Holidays could have fit in any of the anchor positions…except that there is no representative story. Each of these eleven stories is different from every other story.

Even the genres are different. The stories run the gamut from suspense to science fiction, from romance to fantasy. We even have a Wellsian piece, filled with lovely Victorian details.

If you love time travel stories as much as I do, you'll find a lot to love here. If you love holiday stories as much as I do, then you'll also find a lot to love here.

This is one of the most memorable volumes of stories I've ever edited. I got the answer to my question as I read these eleven stories for the first time. Had I made a mistake combining time travel stories with holiday stories? Oh, heavens, no. It was a brilliant idea.

I should simply have trusted the writers. They took me to places I'd never been before, and made me see the world in a whole new way.

I couldn't have asked for more than that.