Most time-travel novels bend the calendar to fit the story. Heather Lynn checked the moon.
In her Sky Watcher series, Charlotte Harper crosses into the past on a night the sky is doing what the book says it is. “Charlotte’s belief system has her ‘travelling’ on the night of a new moon and arriving during a full moon,” Heather explains, and the dates hold up if you check them. “I wanted to be accurate, so the dates and times of the moon’s phases throughout, are accurate.”
A love story that needed a door into the past
The series started with the stories that shaped the writer. “I have always been a fan of time travel stories, from Doctor Who, which I watched with my dad when I was little, and my kids after that,” Heather says, alongside Back to the Future, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Outlander. What she wanted to add was a specific kind of romance. “I also wanted to see a modern woman fall in love in a time when things were looked at differently, more concealed, and less public.”
The mechanism arrived the moment she pictured her lead. “When I saw the beginning of Charlotte’s story, I saw the whole thing,” she says; the only puzzle left was moving her through time in a way she “hadn’t already read or watched.” Her answer was Charlotte’s faith. The character travels “with her beliefs and her stones.”
Charlotte came just as clearly, not from a worksheet: “as a first-time writer, I didn’t think about her character in those terms.” Heather simply knew who Charlotte had to be, someone “brave (braver than me), knowledgeable, firm in her beliefs, determined to accomplish her goal and accept that this might not work.”
The homework behind the magic
Family history runs through Charlotte’s journey and Heather’s real life alike. Her mother has spent years building the family tree, back when “the only resources she had were birth/death certificates, cemetery plots, ship/plane manifests, and photos.” Even now the trail goes cold where every genealogist’s does. She “still gets stuck in the places where records weren’t strictly kept. This is where we are in the story.”
The stones work the same way: belief made concrete. To Charlotte, they carry “not magic, but rather energy,” worn or carried depending on whether the day calls for luck, courage, safety, or dreams.
The consequences that keep her up at night
The series gets tangled in what happens after Charlotte changes something. Books two, three, and four “incorporate the consequences of changed events,” which raises the whiplash question: “what happens to right now, if you just changed something 200 years ago?” Heather loves the problem. “Fun! I love this question!!” she says, even on the nights the mechanics refuse to cooperate. “Some nights I would lie in bed thinking about this and it would all make sense,” she admits, right up until her brain revolted. She’s made peace with her own rules: “since time travel doesn’t exist to date, my way works for me.”
Under all of it runs Charlotte’s thread to the present, and the friend she left there. For all the moon math, that link is what the series is really about: readers “follow her intermittent ‘connection’ to her best friend Jessica,” who she left in the 21st century.
Sky Watcher: A Shadow in Time opens the series, followed by Sky Watcher: Déjà-Vu and Sky Watcher: Between The Shadows, with a fourth book on the way. Find the books and follow Heather at HeatherLynnBooks.com, on BookBub and Goodreads, and as @SkyWatcher_hl on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the Sky Watcher series about?
Heather Lynn's time-travel romance series follows Charlotte Harper, who crosses from the 21st century into the past using her beliefs and stones, on real, verifiable moon phases. Later books deal with the consequences of changing the past.
What order do the Sky Watcher books go in?
Sky Watcher: A Shadow in Time is first, followed by Sky Watcher: Déjà-Vu and Sky Watcher: Between The Shadows, with a fourth book on the way.
How does Heather Lynn handle the time-travel rules?
She keeps the moon phases and dates accurate, and lets Charlotte travel through her faith and her stones. Books two onward work through what changing the past does to the present.