Question for readers of Time Travel Tales

I'm hoping (see previous post) to properly start work on my non-Who Time Travel tale next week and I've been thinking about it a good deal in the meantime. The one thing I've been wondering is whether or not to have an object that precipitates Danny's time-travelling. My original idea was that he would not have such an object - no mechanical or magical machine that causes him to time-travel, so no TARDIS ("Doctor Who"), no DeLorean ("Back to the Future"), no Art Deco radio (London Calling), no Rift ("Torchwood"/"Doctor Who"), no bags of Time (Johnny and the Bomb), etc.

But I remembered conversations about Susan Cooper's King of Shadows, in which young Nat Field travels back to 1599 without the use of a particular time-travel device and now I'm wondering which method readers prefer ? If I choose to go for the no device option, how much of an explanation would you want for how Danny manages to travel in time ? Personally I'm quite happy without a detailed explanation (I think part of the reason I love King of Shadows is the mystery that surrounds Nat's time-travelling, but I'm curious to know what others prefer.

A Question for Fiction Writers

I've written another disconnected chunk of my non-Who story "Improbable Journeys" - and I find myself wondering if this is normal fiction practice ? Because so far, apart from a couple of Epilogues, I've pretty much written my Who stories straight through from Prologue/Chapter 1 through to Chapter 4/Epilogue without any wandering off. Whereas this story now has an opening paragraph, a short dialogue and piece of character description from later in chapter one, and now a random few paragraphs from another chapter, but I've no idea which one...

As with the other two sections I've written, this new bit seemed to just spring into my head, then flow onto the page from my pen, leaving me feeling rather like someone's amanuensis - which I understand is not an uncommon experience for some writers. But it is uncommon for me, so far at any rate, to write random chunks of prose that aren't directly connected to each other...

I'm not complaining, mind ! Just puzzled - as I frequently have been ever since I took up this fiction-writing business five months ago (and is it really only five months ? Somehow it feels far longer !)

More from "Improbable Journeys"

I was minding my own business, serving up my dinner earlier, and two of the other characters from Improbable Journeys started a conversation in my head, so I wrote down the conversation, then expanded on it a bit. I'm not sure whereabouts it fits into the tale (quite near the beginning, though). I'm slightly concerned the character descriptions are over the top so I'd be grateful for some feedback.

"Is this him?" asked Castella, tapping the screen in front of her.
"That's him," confirmed Ash.
"Right. Let's go and see him then. And let's hope he's not too argumentative."
"He's a teenager. They're programmed to be argumentative," answered Ash.
"Programmed?" asked Castella, stopping dead so that he almost ran into her back. "You didn't tell me he wasn't human."
Ash sighed. "He is human. 100%. I meant genetically programmed."
"Oh. Why didn't you say so then?" She strode off.
Ash rolled his eyes, unseen, as he followed her down the corridor to their ship. Sometimes he really wished she wasn't quite so literal-minded. He hurried to catch up with her, knowing she would be irritated if he kept her waiting. They made an interesting contrast. Castella was a tall, red-haired woman, willowy in build, but strong, as all TICK Agents had to be. Ash was short, and looked even shorter next to Castella. He was also bald and tubby. For him, staying fit was a constant battle; not that he over-ate, it was simply that Nature had intended him to be a short, tubby man with a jolly face. He looked like a caricature of everyone's favourite bachelor uncle. Castella, on the other hand, was probably a caricature of everyone's least favourite spinster aunt. She had hawk-bright eyes and a beaky nose. Ash had often wondered if she'd ever considered surgery, but he'd always concluded that she would consider it mere vanity, and the one fault she definitely didn't possess was vanity.

And now for something completely different

As they always used to say on Monty Python.

I wrote the opening paragraph of my non-"Doctor Who" story last night (working title: Improbable Journeys) and this is it:

The one thing that Danny's history books never really made clear was the smell of the past. It was something he always noticed on his improbable journeys; that somehow the past smelled different. Right now his nose was full of the smell of mud, blood and death. It hadn't stopped raining for the last three days according to Hodges and the mud was so thick that men frequently pulled a foot out of it to find they'd left their boot behind. The duckboards were supposed to help but they just couldn't compete; half an hour after being laid down, they were sinking into the grey morass. Danny had only arrived three hours ago, but he felt as if he'd been struggling through the mud for three days too.

What do you think ?

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In other writing news, I've written my Doctor Who poem that Elaine challenged me to write, but I'm totally convinced it's too bad to post...