Blog Tour: 27 Days to Midnight by Kristine Kruppa

17:15 Cilla 3 Comments

The initial inspiration for 27 Days to Midnight came to me inside an old clock tower in downtown Detroit. A friend and I were exploring the building, seeing what lay up flights of rickety winding staircases and past floors thick with dust. We found the inside of an enormous clock.

I remember standing in the center of a tall, sun-drenched room, staring at the massive clock faces on each of the four walls. At the turn of each minute, one hand on each of the clocks advanced with an echoing click that echoed in the otherwise still room. I could hear each individually, a kind of rapid tick-tick-tick-tick. It was like standing inside time itself.

I knew I had to write about it.

I let the idea roll around in the back of my mind until it eventually became the world of 27 Days to Midnight, where watches show how long people have to live. This concept grew into a plot over the course of several years.

Choosing a genre was easy. I’m an engineer by day, so I love mechanical, machine-packed steampunk. Steampunk provided the freedom for me to create strange inventions: robotic horses, dogs, insects, and even people.

The settings in the story were inspired by pieces of our own world. When I’m not writing or engineering, I spend my time traveling. I took bits of places I’ve been—France, Italy, Peru, Vietnam, and Laos—and wove them into a fictional world filled with cliff cities and cobblestone streets.

Characters were more difficult. I initially wanted to write a tough, independent female lead who would have no qualms about running off on her adventure. But that didn’t feel right. Instead, I created Dahlia. Dahlia has no experience outside of the comfortable upper-class lifestyle she’s always known. She has to learn how survive. She’s helped along the way by Farren, who was inspired by a simple question: What would a person do if their watch was running out? How would they come to terms with that, and how would it change their life if they always knew they would die at a young age? The other characters started in various ways and evolved through the many cycles of revisions that led up to the final version of the story. Some of them, particularly the antagonist, Sebastian, turned out far different than I’d planned!