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A Confounding World
Not Yet Your Time follows a self-deprecating office worker whose mundane New York life derails after a near-death encounter with a mysterious woman, leading him to question everything he knows about time, fate, and faith. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I have always felt that the best drama or comedy follows from individuals being placed in situations for which they are utterly unprepared. (Being trapped on Everest while climbing is not the same as crash landing on Everest in your swim trunks) I have also always had the sneaking suspicion that our history, our myths, and the foundations of our culture are on very wobbly grounds. Finally, as someone who spent a full career in marketing, I know that reality is just a press release away from changing.
I found Titus to be an interesting character who gets pulled into a strange situation and manages to adapt despite everything that happens to him. Were you able to achieve everything you wanted with the characters in the novel?
When I embark on creating, in effect, an entire world, I need a central character to react to, digest, and pass through it. I needed Titus to be that person. I gave him the vulnerabilities and hidden strengths to attempt to deal with a confounding world that has sucked him in against his will, only because he was attracted to a mysterious woman. I was also pleased with Kanenas, my, in effect, flawed and reluctant messiah. A good man with ideas, totally unprepared for the greatness that is hung on his shoulders. (Inside secret) I patterned him after the attitude and speech mannerisms of the late actor Peter O’Toole, also a great and deeply flawed person.
I found this novel to be a cutting piece of satire. What is one thing that you hope readers take away from your novel?
Absorb all you can in life from as many sources as you can tolerate because no one person or philosophy has all the answers.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
The world’s greatest historian has a dark secret. He travels back in time and gets deathbed confessions from great figures in history. A Gesture to the Wind is narrated by the historian’s unsuspecting assistant, who is drawn into a world of illegal historic relic dealers, Russian spies, EPA investigators, and the Battle of San Juan Hill, all while developing a deep and abiding friendship with a time-displaced Ben Franklin. (As you can see, I’m having fun.)
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This odd trio embark on a perilous odyssey that includes imprisonment in a labyrinthine security complex under the ruins of the World Trade Center; flight through a murky unfinished tunnel beneath the Hudson River, a safe house masquerading as a defunct museum; and a perilous train ride to link up with a terror cell. Ultimately, the reluctant Titus will face a rendezvous with life, love, death, and destiny in the green wilds of New York’s Hudson Valley.
Not Yet Your Time
James Terminiello’s Not Yet Your Time is a strange, sharp, and funny novel that refuses to play by any ordinary rules. The story follows Titus Carneades, a self-deprecating office worker whose mundane New York life derails after a near-death encounter with a mysterious woman he dubs the “Benevolent Pumpkin.” What begins as a simple act of rescue spins into an absurd web of government agents, terrorist dance troupes, cultish believers, and philosophical riddles about time, fate, and faith. The tone flips easily between satire and suspense, and the plot lurches forward with a cinematic kind of chaos that somehow always lands on its feet.
Reading this book felt like falling down a rabbit hole built by Kafka and decorated by Mel Brooks. The dialogue snaps with dry wit, and the narrative voice never takes itself too seriously. Terminiello clearly enjoys skewering bureaucracy, politics, and the media, and he does it with a mix of intelligence and goofiness that’s both refreshing and exhausting. Some scenes stretch on like fever dreams full of bureaucratic jargon and absurd acronyms, but that’s part of the joke. Beneath the humor, though, there’s a weird tenderness. Titus, for all his bumbling and sarcasm, starts to feel like an everyman trying to locate meaning in a world so absurd it can only be laughed at. The book made me laugh, then think, then laugh again because I realized how close the nonsense hits to home.
The writing style took me a while to settle into. The sentences wander, full of digressions and witty detours, but there’s a rhythm to it, like jazz. The story moves in bursts, then slows to reflect on life’s ironies, then speeds up again in a flurry of chaos. I liked how Terminiello uses humor to talk about big ideas without sounding preachy. The world he builds feels surreal but eerily plausible, and that combination stuck with me. Sometimes I wanted a breath, a quiet moment without a punchline. But then again, that’s life in Titus’s head, too much, too fast, and too real to pause.
In the end, Not Yet Your Time is an absurdist romp with a beating human heart underneath all the noise. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy satire with teeth, or anyone who’s ever felt trapped in the grind and wondered if the universe is just messing with them for sport. It’s witty, weird, and surprisingly soulful. If you like your fiction bold, funny, and a little philosophical, this one’s worth your time.
Pages: 186 | ASIN : B0FMHB61S5
LITERARY TITAN 