The interesting thing was, as the story sort of told itself—I mean, layers that ended up in there are only now making themselves known to me—that whatever’s supposed to happen is going to happen despite our best efforts to change it. The only difference is in how we get there, and what we learn in the process. I loved how they handled that in the movie Sliding Doors; here you had one benign moment split into these parallel universes, each seemingly so different from the other, and yet it all came down to the exact same thing happening anyway, albeit at a later date. And I think that brings us back to the "grandfather paradox" you spoke of—if you have the power to go back in time, then you’d better respect it—kind of like the Temporal Prime Directive on Star Trek—because one tiny thing can have an enormous impact on other things you wouldn’t even connect it to. Isn’t that what happened in Frequency? See, I told you I’m much more into movies!

I suppose another way to look at it is to delve into the parallel universe idea, but we’d be here all day if I get going on that!

What was the genesis of Undo the Deed?

Back to the movies thing…I was really into Back to the Future and I’d just seen Peggy Sue Got Married, so I had time travel on the brain. I mean, this was in 1986. One day I decided I wanted to write a child abuse story, and it somehow occurred to me that it had never been done through the context of time travel—not as far as I knew, anyway. And it just really snowballed from there.

The tragedy and heartache of child abuse features prominently in your novel. Were the issues in your novel inspired by a real life experience?

Well, you just hit on the main reason I said I decided to write a child abuse story in 1986. I’d grown up fairly normally at first, but then my mother remarried, and suddenly she and my brother and I were thrust into this totally foreign world of alcohol and violence. And there was a lot of emotional and psychological abuse, too, and I had no outlet for it, which is what really sparked Undo the Deed—it was a purely selfish outlet for my own pent-up thoughts and emotions. But I’d also ended up attracting friends that were being abused in their own ways, and I realized how prominent abuse was, and I felt I needed to tell all our stories somehow, with the hopes of helping others that felt like us to not feel so alone, like we did, and with the hopes of maybe somehow preventing abuse in some way—if that’s even possible. It was interesting because the whole first half of the book was written between 1986 and 1989, and by the time I took the manuscript out of mothballs in 1993 I’d gained a whole new perspective with the help of 12-Step programs and therapy, and it just took the story to a level I never expected it to go. I had to rewrite that whole first half to match the tone of the second. And I was toning down melodrama even up until the final rewrite last year. I’d watched too much Dynasty, I suppose!

I want to point out that my first instinctual response to this question was "Yes, the issues were inspired by real life experiences, unfortunately". I still tend to come at those years with that sense of regret and negativity, with a feeling that it just shouldn’t have happened. But, to kind of go back to the whole time thing, I guess it was my destiny. If I hadn’t gone through what I went through, I never would have felt I needed to write a book about it, and what kind of life would I be leading then, you know? Maybe better, maybe worse—but there’d be no Undo the Deed. That’s been a big part of my recovery—learning to integrate that part of my past into my life experience instead of just wishing it had never happened, which I spent a lot of years doing.