KICKSTARTER

Desert High is a novel about my life, but with a slight fantastic detail - time travel. Everyone has a story of a competitive sports event or game gone awry – something they’d love to have a “do-over” for.

What if your last game as a high school football player ended in controversy? Imagine if the opposing team cheated and got away with it ... and the officials that made some questionable calls later publicly admitted their fault. Think about how you and your high school buddies might feel about this event whenever they’d get back together to reminisce on old times. What if the United States Air Force had developed a real-live time machine on their flight testing base in the Mojave Desert? And what if they were looking for a guinea pig to test the machine and alter a seemingly meaningless event some 30 years in the past? This is the setting for Desert High, which is the actual name of the high school located on Edwards Air Force Base in California. Fans of the history of test flight will relish the background as the football fan will enjoy the action and the kid in us all will thrill at the fantasy of time travel.

It’s like a combination of The Right Stuff meets Friday Night Lights, Varsity Blues and Back to the Future.

Doug Van Pelt is the editor of HM Magazine, which he founded 26 years ago. He has authored the book Rock Stars on God and been a columnist for Guitar World and CCM magazines. He lives with his wife and two children outside of Austin, TX, his beloved city ever since graduating from the high school this book is named after. Desert High is his first novel.

That’s my Desert High kickstarter campaign. I’ve finished the book and am going to self-publish it under the monicker of HM Press. I need to raise 1800 dollars to print a few hundred copies. The success of this book will, as you might expect, enhance and assist HM Magazine and hopefully keep it in print indefinitely.