Today we see that with some books, you only need to read the first line.
What I gleaned about the story: Charlie is a young man who’s been entirely forgettable for as long as he can remember, but on his 16th birthday he suddenly learns the reason why: he and his family are unstuck in time. But before Charlie learns what that means, his father disappears, and in a desperate bid to find him, the boy follows a strange man into a dark alley. And emerges into 18th century London.
Find this book on Amazon.
Analysis: My mother loves me and all, it’s just that she can’t remember my name. And with that one sentence, I am already relaxing. I know this is going to be a good story. I don’t know yet if it’s well edited, but this is a writer’s opening line. There’s an entire short story hidden in that one sentence.
Analysis: In fact, the whole opening sequence is very well crafted. Charlie is an accomplished athelete and a good student. So why is it that when he jumps more than two feet higher than anyone else at the school track meet, somebody else takes the medal? And why does his home room teacher always seem surprised when she reaches his name on the attendance list? It’s because he’s completely forgettable. But that’s okay. He’s used to it, and it’s been happening all his life.
What appeals to me about this is that it’s not overdone. Charlie seems entirely at peace with it. It’s just a weirdness about the way his life has always gone. And by showing it to us in that way, and with that casual acceptance, it makes it all the more curious, and makes him all the more likeable.
Analysis: I love the mechanism of the iPhone. When Charlie goes back in time, the phone in his pocket gets transformed into a tiny notebook. All his contacts are in there, in his handwriting, and even his photos are there, converted into hand-drawn pencil sketches of the original scenes. It’s a very nice touch.
Note: I really enjoyed this and didn’t get bumped out even once. The period details seem real—almost too real, in some places—and the dialect seems entirely convincing. (I won’t say that is real, because I don’t know what gutter-snipes really sounded like in 18th century London.) But this has jumped to the top of my reading list and I’ll be continuing the journey later tonight.
Addendum: I finished it that very night, and enjoyed it all the way to the end, so Untimed was chosen as one of the 8 books to represent ImmerseOrDie in the first IOD StoryBundle collection.
Take the Pepsi Challenge: Want to know if my own writing measures up? Download one of these free short stories, in the format of your choice, and decide for yourself.
Sounds like one to buy. Thanks for doing the finding for us.
I read this a while back and had problems relating to the main character although I found the story extremely well written and equally well crafted.
Yay!! A survivor!!! How exciting.
Some days ago I bought the “Immerse or Die” bundle from storybundle.com and started reading of “Untimed”. Because I’m not a native English speaker my threshold for “bad style” is a little (much) higher than yours, but “Untimed” really annoyed me:
My WTFs were:
1) A guy with a clockwork in his chest, which he has to wind up from time to time (why he is not one of those eco drive guys?),
2) Charlie jumps in a hole, that looks just like the Doctor Who intro. I mean, he was not forced to jump, he just did it. Right after watching this clockwork guy doing it. Maybe he thought “what a robot can survive I will survive too”?
3) Time travelling makes everything paradoxic. I can barely tolerate it in Doctor Who and Back to the Future ;-)
4) Who remodelled the iPhone into a notebook? This is nonsense. If the past can not tolerate new technology than it should dissolve it into pure energy, which would have the effect of some hundred big atomic bombs or so. That would make the story much more logical and shorter!
Beside of those WTFs I don’t like Charlie very much, and I hate this girl Yvaine. So I stopped reading and switched to “Brotherhood of Delinquents” and after that “Pay me, Bug!” and both were fun to read! So we don’t have a totally different taste in books, may be you just were preoccupied by the first sentence, which told you that this is going to be a good story?
Hi Hans. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. In my case, I quite enjoyed some of the very same things that seem to have triggered your believability filter. But that just serves to remind us how each reader comes to a story with their own expectations and requirements. It’s too bad that Untimed didn’t work for you, but I am pleased that you found other books that did and I’m confident you’ll find more to enjoy in the rest of the collection. Happy reading.