When I began this story in June of 1993, I never imagined it would be the last story I would begin for more than five years. I doubt that it had anything to do with the specific project, but that year, writer's block set in hard and fast and refused to budge for a long, long time, longer than I'd ever experienced before. Even though every writer has blocks now and again, this one went on for so long, I feared I was never going to be able to write anything longer than a letter, ever again.

Fortunately, that did not happen.  After more than five years of waiting, the sequel to OUTATIME was finally finished.  The reason this was such a milestone for me is simple: Finishing this story was my version of getting back up on the horse after being thrown. It's the first thing of any length which I'd started writing before the block that I've now been able to finish. It gave me hope that other half-done projects that have been languishing will also be finished someday, along with new ones.

Now, a few words of warning: If you adored the last season or so of Quantum Leap, please DON'T read this story. I watched QL right from the beginning and loved it -- until the pregnancy episode. That was the point at which the writers started flip-flopping about whether or not it was Sam's psyche or body that Leaped, and the rules in general about Leaping changed seemingly at whim, every other week, sometimes ruining episodes that might've been so much better if they'd just stuck to one concept. I kept watching since I continued to enjoy the performances of the two principles (who certainly did their best with sometimes weak material), but a lot of the pleasure went out of it for me when I saw an interview with Donald Bellisario (the show's creator/producer) in which he flat-out said that it didn't matter if they weren't consistent about how Quantum Leap worked, anymore, because the fans would find ways to explain it. Perhaps so, but I didn't believe that was the fans' job. After that, when he lost interest in QL because he was excited about other projects, I'd hoped he would turn it over to someone who still cared about such things, but he never did. The last episode left me (and the roomful of people with whom I'd been watching it) asking, "That's it? That's how it ends? There's got to be a better way to end it than that!"

Hence, No Time Like the Present. As soon as I realized that we'd already set up a better way to end it when we wrote OUTATIME, I knew I had to write it. It took more time getting here than I'd anticipated, but I hope the wait was worth it.

Two small items: I invented neither Thelma Beckett's peach cobbler nor Doc's Uncle Oliver from Milwaukee. Much as I disliked a lot of things about the BTTF cartoon, I was astonished that someone knew enough about my hometown to know that ethnically speaking, it's very German, especially so during the time the generation prior to Doc's would've been around. It so amused and amazed me that the writer of the episode (the plot of which I otherwise found quite absurd) managed to get that detail right, I decided to incorporate it into my stories. Another small item: I seem to have developed something of a fondness for using bits and pieces of short poems in these tales, not merely as chapter headings. The one that appears in Chapter 22 is the second to last line from a very short poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Requiem." If you want to hear the entire poem, either look it up on one of the Internet poetry databases, or ask me. It's not long.