What if coming of age meant saving the world?

What if Elgin resident Tim Vaulato had the ability to travel through time, space and alternate realities?

What if he suddenly and without a choice had these magical abilities and their accompanying responsibility thrust upon him? How would he react?

Those are the questions that led Vaulato, 42, to write his first book, A Lifetime in Time, published April 24.

"It's kind of like a sideways Dr. Who , but the main character is human. He's not noble. He's a teenage boy," Vaulato said. "All of his companions are far smarter than he is, but he doesn't necessarily heed their advice."

A Lifetime in Time -- a 352-page, self-published book aimed at teenagers and adults -- tells the story of a teenage misfit who learns the world will be destroyed before he will finish his junior year of math. It's up to him to save it when he is made Keeper of the mystical Gateway, which allows him to travel in time, space and realities.

"When I was in junior high, I'd sit and I'd fantasize, 'What if we were the only people left?'" Vaulato said.

It's a question the art teacher began asking himself when he was about the same age as the Elgin High School students to whom he now teaches drawing, painting, cartoons and animation.

In history class, he daydreamed about traveling back in time to witness the events and time periods he learned about and what he as a seventh-grader would want to see and do. In an English class, he was assigned to write about an older person he'd met; he turned in a story about meeting himself in the future.

That story became a chapter in A Lifetime in Time when Vaulato began putting on paper the characters and ideas that had been floating around his head and sketchbook for decades. The drawing and writing, he said, always were linked.

"If I get writer's block, I start drawing," Vaulato said. "My head figures out through the drawing what the story is."

He had always told himself and his students he would write the book after he retired. Then one of his students posed the question, "What if you die first?"

Vaulato began writing and creating illustrations for the book in November 2002. A rough draft was finished in April 2004, and two more books in a planned series followed. At the urging of his wife, Collette, that he do something with the first book, Vaulato incorporated a small business, LoKante & Mooschlock Publishing, and had 1,000 copies of A Lifetime in Time printed.

He said he hopes to sell the book at local bookstores and school appearances across the area. He also hopes the book will leave readers, like his EHS students, hungry for the rest of the story and inspire their own daydreams.

"I think definitely one of the huge benefits of it is when I say I have a book, they say, 'Oh, he was able to do that,'" he said.

Vaulato said A Lifetime in Time already has at least one fan in his oldest son, 11-year-old Traven, named after the character that has been such a big part of his imagination -- and now his first book.

"He likes the book," Vaulato said, "but really he would rather see the drawings."

On the Net

www.alifetimeintime.com

Got a story? Give her a call. Contact Emily McFarlan -- your Readers' Reporter -- at emcfarlan@scn1.com or (847) 888-7773.