Timeless Pitch (for Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award submission)

A friend recently informed me of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, a writing contest that is accepting submissions through January 27th, 2013. In it, your novel is judged based on a 300 word pitch, the first 3,000 to 5,000 words of your novel, and the entire manuscript. I submitted in the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror category (one of five categories).

What follows is my pitch. Let me know your thoughts and if you want to move on to reading the excerpt:

You never forget your first time travel. When college freshman Jimmy and his roommate Narrator discover that time travel not only exists but is also controlled by their proselytizing professor Walter, it causes them to question the nature of their very existence—and themselves. 

Jimmy and Narrator began their lives much differently, but have the same desire—to be at peace. Jimmy’s Bostonian upbringing was the conventional “broken family,” an absentee father and a depressed mother. He approaches others with wary sarcasm and uninviting body language, keeping them at a chilly distance. Narrator’s Southern roots were the opposite, a multitude of siblings, omnipresent parents, and God. Anything beyond his accustomed normalcy sends his brain into overload, portending a meltdown. Both young men struggle to maintain their even-keeled exteriors through the new social and educational situations college presents, choosing instead to tread water hoping nothing disrupts their pattern of pondering. Something does.  

Of course it’s Destiny, the daughter of Jimmy and Narrator’s proselytizing professor Walter and the first person Jimmy has taken a liking to in a long while. As she integrates herself into the pair’s lives, they soon learn that Walter is more than a disconcertingly wacky educator. He is also the fanatical leader of the Supreme Council, the governing body of time travel, who has made it his mission to socially engineer time through a series of Changes to elicit a more equitable outcome for all—and for some reason thinks Jimmy and Narrator are all that stand in his way of finally perfecting the process. 

Timeless, the first novel installment in a planned series of four, is the story of college freshmen opening their eyes to the truth of the world and themselves and deciding whether any of it is worth fighting for.