"Ok, so it’s true. I can time-travel. But it's not as exciting as it sounds."
— Jackson Meyer Tempest: A Novel.
Written by Julie Cross, Tempest: A Novel is the story of Jackson, an ordinary college student. He has a girlfriend and likes to party. And he can speak French. Only he can also travel through time. At first nothing changes in the present when he jumps. He just has the memories of what he did. Them some mysterious people show up at his door shouting nonsense and shoot his girlfriend. Panicked, Jackson jumps into the past, into 2007. Now he must figure out how to return to 2009 and save his girlfriend from her imminent death. But while he's in 2007, he tries to make the best of things.
Has a prequel short story also on this page, "Tomorrow is Today".
Now has a film in development, as well as two sequels, Vortex and Timestorm, that need either a folder or a page.
This series provides examples of:
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Series as a Whole
- Everyone Loves Blondes: Holly is blonde, but then, she doesn't really have much competition either.
- Shout-Out: Many to Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Inverted. Jackson remembers the new timeline, but the original timeline never changes.
- Time Travel: The entire reason the plot exists.
- Played with. Jackson can only travel back in time, and cannot change anything in the past.
- TVTeens: Averted. The main cast of the series are almost all in their late teens and early twenties, and behave accordingly. While they do swear, drink, throw wild parties, and even have sex, they never do so to an excessive amount, and the fact that they do so is never brought up and treated as normal. Despite all this, for the most part all seem rather mature for their age.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: If Jackson goes into the past for 20 minutes, his body goes comatose for about 2 seconds. Any pain he feels or injuries he incurs are apparently reduced by a similar amount, making him feel like a ghost.
Tomorrow is Today
- Geeky Turn-On: Jackson finds Holly doing her homework almost sexy, which is totally bizarre.
- Holly accepts Jackson's offer to recite A Tale of Two Cities from memory in French a little too quickly.
- G-Rated Drug: Played straight with caffeine for Adam. Jackson has a theory that it's because "[Adam's] brain's already going a mile a minute."
- Time Travel: Jackson uses this ability twice.
- Once during the party to see what it would be like to eat a bunch of food and see if he feels full. He instead decides to kiss Holly
- Once more to help Holly find one of her kids who is lost in the woods at the rich kid's camp.
- Unresolved Sexual Tension: Between Jackson and Holly.
- Wild Teen Party: Not as bad as most, but there is loud music, dancing, drinking, and everybody gets kicked out before the Resident Adviser gets the security guards. Also Holly and her boyfriend crash the party, not that Jackson minds.
Tempest: A Novel
- Alternate Timeline: 2007, apparently.
- Battle in the Rain: The Final Battle between the EOT and the CIA. Justified due to the mechanics of time travel.
- Cursed with Awesome: On one hand, Jackson can travel through time. On the other both the EOT and the CIA are out to recruit him, or kill him/his family if he joins the other side.
- Fiction 500: Justified in that Jackson's father is a CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and never explicitly shown off, but Jackson casually offers to buy Holly a car on the spot. We're never told if he's joking.
- Fifth Chapter Spoiler: Holly's death and Jackson's subsequent time jump back to 2007.
- Gray Rain of Depression: It starts to rain when Jackson realizes he's Trapped in the Past. Rain is a side effect of time travel.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality:
- The EOT do some pretty bad stuff, but most of them try not to kill unless they have to, and it is later revealed that they are actually only trying to prevent the bad future.
- The CIA is just as shady and some of it's members, like Marshall, are equally, if not more ruthless than the EOT, but they are considered more sympathetic, probably because the EOT killed Holly once already.
- Interrupted Intimacy: Jackson and 007 Holly are about to make love for the first time, when Jackson's father - who has never met Holly - returns from South America early.Holly: Jackson, your dad just saw me in my underwear. I'm allowed to be a little humiliated.
- Littlest Cancer Patient: Posthumous version. Courtney died of cancer before the story begins. That doesn't stop Jackson from going back in time to meet his twin. He even jumps to her death so she doesn't have to die alone. This doesn't stop her from being a huge
Tear Jerker. - Love Transcends Spacetime: Jackson tries to do this with Holly averted at the end of the book, where he erases himself from her life by going back to the day they met. He lets her walk on past instead of running into him.
- Newspaper Dating / What Year Is This?: Jackson prefers the former to the later, but has used both to find out when he is.
- Parents Walk In at the Worst Time: Invoked by Jackson when he asks his dad to "accidentally" walk in on him and 007 Holly to keep anything from happening. It also happens naturally the first time his dad meets 007 Holly, when she and Jackson have discarded most of their clothing and are about to make love for the first time.
- Rapid-Fire Typing: Adam is implied to do this at one point.
- Screw Destiny: Jackson jumps back in time to save Holly. Played straight in that Holly survives, but true to the feel of the book, the ending is still a tear jerker.
- Shout-Out: Jackson calls Holly from 2007 007 Holly.
- The Slow Path: Jackson's backup plan for returning to 2009 is to just live until 2009 comes back.
- This Is Reality: Before either time travel or the CIA are explained, the reader/listener is told to forget everything (s)he has seen in movies.
- Time Police: Apparently it's a super secret branch of the CIA.
- Time Travel: Played with as explained above.
- He does jump back to 2007 and gets stuck though.
- Time-Travel Romance: Again, Jackson with Holly
- Trapped in the Past: When Jackson gets stuck
- Unresolved Sexual Tension: Jackson and 009 Holly are already a couple, but it's there between Jackson and 007 Holly.
Vortex
- Sarcastic Confession: Agent Kendrick tells her team of agents-in-training that she's engaged to be married, drawing wisecracks and eyerolls. Jackson is the only one who knows she's serious, because he met her fiancee the night before.
