Time in the Mahu Series

As I began to write books in the Mahu Investigations series, I had to figure out how to handle the passage of time. It quickly became clear to me that I wanted to track Kimo’s coming out process—meeting gay friends, getting a boyfriend, settling down and so on. So I needed to keep track of how much time had passed between books, and try to age Kimo appropriately.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with him! Mahu Surfer, the second book in the series, takes place only a few weeks after the end of Mahu, yet was published in 2007, two years after Mahu debuted. Then book three, Mahu Vice, came out two years later in its first edition from Alyson Books.

So poor Kimo was stuck in a time warp. When MLR Press picked up the series after the demise of Alyson, I sat down to review the books again. When I first wrote Mahu, nobody had cell phones, so Kimo’s search for a pay phone in the early chapters was reasonable. He had a cassette tape deck in his truck, too. Now those details seemed jarring.

Until 1967, there was a law on the books in Hawaii that required all children to have a Christian first name, not a Hawaiian one. Kimo’s older brothers have Christian first names – Louis and Howard. But when Kimo was born, his parents deliberately gave him a Hawaiian name, because they could.

But as I revised I realized that would make him too old. So his birth date changed to 1974, and I had to dump that little tidbit.

Even so, time was going to have to be elastic if I was only going to publish every two years.  I did my best to move Kimo ahead a year or two for each book but I still fell behind. Finally in Ghost Ship I moved forward a couple of extra years to catch up. 

But that caused more problems. One of the key plot elements in the book is the theft of plutonium after the meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant in Japan in 2011. When I began writing the book the disaster had just happened—but with my sped-up timetable, the meltdown became history, and I had to tweak the details to fit.

What’s going to happen to Kimo and Mike now? Well, for a long time I thought that Ghost Ship would be the end of their adventures. I’d tracked them through years of change, from coming out into middle age and fatherhood. What was left? Then Kimo started talking to me again… so we’ll see how I have to massage time for the next book!