My book doesn't actually have a subtitle, I just figured it would be good for the context of this post. So anyway, I've written a book and spent countless hours/days/weeks (???) working on it over the past six years. I'm still hesitant to post the entire thing here, but I have nothing against posting snippets from the book to gauge your feedback. I recently revised the book (although I highly doubt I fixed everything... ugh) for a contest entry, only to find that I missed the entry period today. So in hopes of turning it around, I'm going to try posting/shopping my book to whoever seems like they might be interested in it. If anything, I'm posting this here to make sure that I'll be able to "handle" shopping it to anyone else. Without further delay, here's some pieces of my book:
The date is December 19th, 2006 and the time is roughly 3:00 PM. A small town called Dawnsville is where our story is based. One of our heroes is a young, 15 year-old teenage boy: Tom Rancher. Yesterday was his birthday, and today he simply retired to his bed. He was very tired and thought his life was far too boring for his own good. He remembered watching adventurous movies, TV shows and even reading various types of literature, wondering why those fantastic adventures couldn’t happen to him!
His head was always in the clouds, speculating various things that he generally had nothing to do with. Though he did well in school, his imagination prevented him from thinking of his own future. He would frequently think of the past. He knew that many great things had happened before his birth, and didn’t see anything in store for his future. His parents told him as a child that his earlier living relatives had very exciting lives in the late 1800’s. In fact, he remembered vividly being told about the lightning storm that struck one of his grandfather’s houses, which was saved from being engulfed in flames because he kept a lightning rod installed on the roof.
Today he became bored with his own wallowing and decided to go to an old friend’s house. This friend was one he kept since his childhood in 1996. Her name was Jenna. She had a very unique personality; she was always ready for adventure and constantly curious. She had many unique behaviors, one of which caused her to dye her hair pink. Overall, she was a very pleasant person and the best friend of Tom.
Tom walked along the neighborhood streets over to Jenna’s house, seeing many advertisements for an old, musty house that had been put up for sale. Tom was wondering why anyone would leave a house in such a terrible condition. In the picture, he saw broken windows and peeling paint. What he found really strange, yet very funny was that the sign said:
“Needs minor repair”
Tom left his thoughts about the strange house and knocked on Jenna’s door as he entered the vicinity of the house. Quite quickly, she came and opened the door to see her friend on this boring Tuesday afternoon.
“Hey Jenna… Just thought I’d stop by!”
“What’s up?” Jenna asked Tom.
Tom knew the answer, but tried to keep it interesting,
“Not much, but have you seen that old house for sale? Looks like a cool thing to check out!”
Jenna accepted the tempting offer of an interesting adventure. Neither of them knew exactly what scale of an adventure this would turn out to be. They walked through the rather dull town, looking at sights they had seen for years.
Nothing really interesting seemed to be going on, although many of the deteriorating buildings were in the process of being remodeled. The concept of the buildings had been the same: local heirlooms of striving small-business owners passing down their careers to their offspring. Having seen this for years, many of the people were shocked when the bigger and more popular business chains started moving into their quaint little town, replacing some of the most historic locations there.
Tom vaguely remembered some, but his focus wasn’t on that; it was on making something interesting happen again. There was a very long road of many houses they followed to get to this beat-up old house. Tom kept the address fresh in his mind:
“1164 Johnson Drive”
Tom and Jenna approached the door, and Tom jiggled the handle. The door was not locked; it was stuck. The door seemed to have formed a strong bond with the wall and looked as though it hadn’t been opened in years. Soon, Tom became frustrated and yanked on the door knob.
Apparently it was well-enforced, as the knob flew out, taking a chunk of the door itself with it! Tom flew backward as well, but readily bounced back up, knowing he now had entry to the house. Jenna pushed the door inward, and they gently walked inside. They looked around this house in awe.
There were inventions of all sorts lying about the cluttered house, many had dust and were very crude-looking models of futuristic mechanics to come.
Most of the machines were broken or completely out of power, except for one thing that caught Tom’s eye.
It was as shiny as a beautiful piece of gold, and wasn’t old-looking at all. He picked it up and examined it. It was a small box-like machine with a clock-like interface and had many buttons. Tom saw that it lit up brightly and seemed ready to use for whatever purpose it served. Tom read from the machine’s odd interface, set specifically for:
“March 15th, 1996, 6:00 AM”
During all of this Jenna was already preoccupied and looking on her own for something of interest. Tom was curious so he decided to disrupt Jenna and said,
“Jenna, come here and check this out! It’s really weird.”
Jenna dropped the other strange machine she was holding and ran over to see what Tom was talking about.
“What is that?” she asked him.
“I’m not sure. It doesn’t look like it works or anything.”
The face of the machine was very clean, and they soon saw a very large button that had a clear reading:
“GO”
“Hey… I’ll bet this button activates whatever it does; should I press it?” Tom asked Jenna.
“Go for it! I mean, it can’t be dangerous or anything. It probably won’t even work right.”
Jenna was quite wrong about that, as when Tom pressed the button, a sudden flash of white enveloped him! He could no longer see Jenna. From Jenna’s perspective, she saw a large, white sphere surround Tom and was nearly blinded from its powerful glare. Knowing something would soon happen to Tom, she quickly jumped into the sphere and grabbed him.
Both were blinded by the bright light around them, but knew they needed to keep holding onto each other. Tom boldly held the strange gold machine in his hand, still feeling the strain of Jenna’s hand on him.
I can't seem to format my book well here... but that's pretty much the first chapter. It's a pretty quick opening, but the meat of the story really gets into who they are when they travel through time. I'd be willing to answer any questions you guys have about my work and possibly even share more of the story with you, but I'd like first of all some responses to this part of my work. For instance: Would any of you be interested in this kind of book at all?
