A novel by Daniel Caulfield
An Exploration of Love, Time Travel
& the Prism of Narrative
The Story
David Wilson is on the lam. A fugitive writer who hasn't finished his novel in twenty years, hitchhiking west with nothing but a backpack and a first chapter everyone's forgotten.
Then Abbott pulls over—a Tom Selleck lookalike in a red Ferrari 308 who claims to have time-traveled out of Woodstock after absorbing five hundred doses of LSD through his skin.
He's looking for Lucille—his lost wife, separated not by miles but by decades. David sees a story worth telling. And maybe, just maybe, a way to write himself back to life.
The journey in movements
A hitchhiker and a holy man in a Ferrari. Five sheets of brown acid dissolved by rain at Woodstock. A doorknob made of light. The road trip begins where reality ends—on the hard shoulder of a northeastern interstate where a man named Abbott opens the passenger door and says, "Well then, David. How the hell are you?"
Inside the institution, Abbott's best friend Denton White cures himself by studying the teachings of Kwai Chang Caine from the television series Kung Fu. The patients perform Tai Chi like a fever dream. The doctors don't understand. The orderlies are afraid. And somewhere in this beautiful chaos, the line between madness and enlightenment dissolves.
David arrives at a remote cabin, alone. Letters begin to arrive—from Abbott, from ghosts, from a past that refuses to stay behind. Laura still calls his mother. The charges pile up. And with each walk to the shipping store, David becomes more convinced that the story he's carrying is the only thing that can save him.
Everything converges. The unreliable narrators reveal their hand. Fiction and reality trade places. David finally understands: the novel he's been unable to write is the life he's been unable to live. And to finish either one, he must place a final period that will land with the force of a meteor.
From Amazon & Goodreads
"Caulfield's novel is filled with flawed, lovable characters I've found myself missing since finishing the book, and revisiting in my mind like old friends. It feels rare to find a story as clever as it is touching."
—Christopher M. Begg, CFA
"The book starts with early momentum and doesn't let up until the conclusion. The prose is brilliant and, just when you think the author has over-written a passage, he calls himself out and brings the story back to earth."
—Lorraine G.
"At times it feels like the sort of book that could revive a lost genre. In a post-pandemic world where we are all feeling a bit unstuck from our pasts, this book provides the gift of allowing us to imagine a time when our lives come off the pause button."
—Amazon Reader
From the Opening Pages
Before Laura left and I lost my job and met the abbot and entered into the period I like to think of as my life on the lam, I had a colleague who was always insisting that dramatic tension could be created through juxtaposition. I hated that word. As far as I was concerned, it was sophomoric and cloying. But my colleague thought he was Columbus. He had discovered a new device. He named it juxtapositive tension, and he proudly planted his flag.
When I met "the abbot," I had to eat a small meal of crow. I'd been stranded on the hard shoulder of a northeastern interstate, hitchhiking west, and the abbot pulled over to offer me a ride. He was driving a red Ferrari. It was the same model Tom Selleck used to drive in that Magnum P.I. show from the eighties, and when he introduced himself as a man of the cloth, I thought, "Motherfucker. It's a clear case of juxtapositive tension!"
A novel that lives at the intersection of literary fiction and cosmic absurdity—for anyone who's felt that the best stories exist just beyond the edge of what's believable.
The threads that connect everything
David has spent twenty years trying to write a novel that he believes already exists—fully formed, somewhere in his future. The book asks whether the lives we're meant to live are waiting for us, or whether we create them in the act of writing them down. It's a question about faith, creativity, and the courage to place a final period.
Abbott experiences time not as a sequence but as a landscape—something you can wander through, get lost in, circle back on. His Woodstock trip isn't just drug-induced hallucination; it's a portal through which the novel reimagines how we relate to our past selves, our lost loves, and the futures we can almost reach.
The novel is upfront about its unreliable narrators, even as it plays fast and loose with who is actually telling the story. Voices shift. Timelines overlap. And by the end, the reader must ask: is David writing Abbott's story, or is Abbott writing David's? The answer might be the most surprising thing in the book.
Abbott describes thousands of acres of aspen trees connected beneath the ground by a spider-web of fungal wire. "We're just like that forest," he says. The metaphor runs through the entire novel—binding its characters, its timelines, and its themes into a single organism that only reveals itself when you step far enough back to see the whole.
From Magnum P.I. to Kung Fu to The Incredible Hulk, the novel treats television not as escapism but as the mythology of a generation—the stories that shaped how Abbott, David, and Denton White understood themselves. It's a love letter to the narratives we absorb without realizing they're writing us.
398 pages of love, madness, time travel, and the most unreliable narrators you'll ever trust.
Also available at Barnes & Noble · Waterstones
In the Next Moment Everything Will Change is a debut literary fiction novel by Daniel Caulfield, published by Total Genius Press. The novel follows David Wilson, a fugitive writer, and Abbott, a hippie time traveler who claims to have traveled through time at the 1969 Woodstock music festival after absorbing 500 doses of LSD. Themes include unreliable narrators, time travel, lost love, writer's block, counterculture, psychedelic experiences, and the transformative power of fiction. Compared by Kirkus Reviews to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Available in paperback and Kindle editions.