Excitement, Adventure, & Really Wild Things

Alice Raikes wants to escape. Her whole life, she expected something important to happen, but she has a dead end job, lives in Texas, and is transgender to boot. Things are not going well. When the sun goes out, her first response is: "Finally." Five minutes later, the sun switches back on, and everybody acts like nothing happened. Only Alice and her friends remember the Five Minute Darkness, but they cannot explain it. When Alice discovers a mysterious silver sphere, it turns out to be an Artifact of Doom that puts her and her friends on a collision course with the mysterious Five, who have manipulated history and have a grudge against them -- for reasons Alice and her friends are unaware. Complicating things is a madwoman named Katherine who wants to kill every version of herself in existence, because reasons. Little does anyone realize the Five Minute Darkness is symptomatic of a bigger problem created by the Five, which threatens to tear their universes apart. It figures Alice's One Great Thing would be the End of the World. "Excitement, Adventure, and Really Wild Things" is Book One in the Navigator series, a sci-fi superhero space opera fantasy. (Phew!) Starting from a world similar (but not identical) to our own, it introduces our luckless "heroes" and shoves them face first into a cosmos where time travel, gender-bending, and parallel universes are par for the course. It also has an unhealthy obsession with the number five. It is anti-authoritarian, a little bit queer, and laced with geek humor.