Time travel is just a fascinating idea. I’ve always thought so. Apparently, a lot of other people think so too, based on the popularity of time travel books, movies and TV shows. Of course, it would really make a mess of things, but what fun to imagine going backward or forward through time. I use a time travel motif in my second novel, “The Time Telephone.” The story is a serious one, as time travel stories sometimes are. A teenage girl is trying to call the past to save her mother’s life.

I’ve been thinking lately about my favorite time travel books and movies. I enjoyed the first several books in Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series where a 1940s nurse falls through time to the early 1700s in the Scottish Highlands. The books are now a TV series on Starz. Of course, the 1960 movie “The Time Machine” was very exciting – and scary – traveling to a distant future when dumb humans live above ground and sinister quasi-humans live in caves. My favorite recent time travel flicks are “About Time,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “Kate and Leopold,” and “The Lake House.” Although “The Lake House” is a bit like my novel in that there is no actual time travel but rather, there is communication through time. I can’t leave out the “Back to the Future” movies – loved the first two, especially – and “Groundhog Day.” “Timeline,” based on the Michael Crichton novel, was also fun to watch. There are plenty of others, including “Edge of Tomorrow,” the Tom Cruise movie, though it's a bit too violent for me to watch.

And don’t you love reading reviews of time travel stories where reviewers complain about the flaws in the stories with their talk of time paradoxes and temporal anomalies? ALL time travel stories are flawed! But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying them.