ABNA Novel contest

This is one of the pitches posted as the winner of last year's Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Contest. In the past, 2009, I had a novel that made it to quarter finalist but last year I didn't make it past the pitch stage. I felt rather humiliated actually, until I saw the posting of the pitches for the last two year's winners. Clearly I never had a chance, but just curious. Would you want to read these books?

From General Fiction Winner, 2012, A Beautiful Land.
Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy steals a time machine that's low on batteries and attempts to save girl from impending annihilation... You know how this goes.

Tak O'Leary is a Japanese-American television host who vanished off the grid after a failed suicide attempt. Samira Moheb is an Iranian-American military translator suffering from PTSD as a result of her time in the Iraq War. They have been in love from the moment they met, and because they never told each other, they are destined to be apart forever. But thanks to a mysterious invention buried deep in the Australian Outback, they now have one more chance to get it right.

Of course, it won't be easy. Love never is. First they have to avoid being captured by a powerful and mysterious corporation. Then they must take down a deranged scientist who is trying to unleash a monstrous creature upon the world. Finally, there's the matter of the invention—an impossible machine with the ability to destroy time itself. If Tak and Samira hope to reunite and save the world, they must use this machine to find a theoretical reality constructed by the thoughts of whoever is inside it. They must find the Beautiful Land.



From the 2013 winner, Timebound.

They weren't panic attacks. Of that much, Kate is certain, no matter what the shrink said. But it's even harder to accept the explanation offered by her grandmother—that Kate is reacting to temporal distortions only she can feel, thanks to designer DNA inherited from her time-traveling ancestors. Kate suspects this tale is the result of her grandmother's brain tumor until reality shifts before her very eyes. Her trigonometry teacher morphs into someone else entirely and a stranger sits in her assigned chair, which was empty the second before.