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.
About the Author: Dana Hughes is an ape-descended biped from a small, mostly irrelevant planet in one of the Milky Way Galaxy's outer spiral arms. She was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas but does not consider herself a "Texas native." In point of fact, she would much rather live in New York, London, or really anywhere else for that matter. Preferably somewhere the climate is cool and the people don't sacrifice you to their god. Her childhood involved a steady diet of Dungeons & Dragons, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Uncanny X-Men comics, Pink Floyd, Morrissey, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and pretty much everything else you would expect of someone from Generation X. There was a shocking lack of drugs and alcohol which she is currently trying to rectify. Dana is 39 years old and likes coffee, coffee cake, and everything else with coffee in the name. If there was such a thing as a coffee cat (as in, a cat that looked and smelled like coffee) she would own all of them. She prefers to call herself a "writer" because she writes things. "Authors" are writers who are successful. That is not her. She spends entirely too much time reading Wikipedia, TV Tropes, and other online time sinks. She is not good at self-promotion and likes to talk about herself in the third person.