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Carl was an exceptionally average man.

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exceptionally average is too oxymoron for me.

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He was neither more nor less.

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This makes it redundant

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He didn’t have a particularly successful career.

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Feels like a double redundant

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Though he wasn’t unsuccessful.

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A triple play of redundancy

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His son was good at sports but never went out for the team. His wife was neither homely nor beautiful. And his car was a Dodge, midsize. In his first 30 years of life, Carl was a glass-is-half-full kind of guy, and after 30 he changed his outlook to half-empty appropriately. If he had one fault it would be that Carl had never once, in all of his life, stood up for what he really wanted. But everything in Carl’s life was about to change in a single trans-temporal flash.

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I think Snapper has nailed the problem. Firstly, it's firmly focused on character that doesn't seem intriguing at this stage of the game. Some people might take it as being condescending towards "normal" people or you're working with a dull character. An ordinary man awakened to something bigger is an interesting character, but at this stage we're being asked to take a journey with a dull man.

The big problem for me though is that it's an info dump. Show us his ordinary life and give us tension in how it will change.

Regards,

Nick

If you think about it, fiction is often--not always but very commonly--about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary events. So the first component doesn't make this story stand out; it's simply, needlessly, stating what we often expect of fiction.

The trick for the hook, it seems to me, is to engage the reader with the ordinary MC. Focusing on his ordinaryness doesn't cut it; as Snapper and Nick T have said, dull isn't engaging. (Except in certain forms of literature concerned with mundanity, but trans-temporality makes this story anything but mundane.)

Take Harry Potter, for example. At the start of the first novel he's ordinary, or thinks he is. We're engaged by the extraordinary things in his life, and instantly feel sympathy for his situation--living under the stairs, downtrodden yet not cowed.

Or, here's the first line from a story in the July issue of Asimov's: "Aimee's big trick is that she makes twenty-six monkeys vanish on stage." Aimee's a fairly ordinary gal, but instead of telling us that, Johnson devotes the first sentence to what makes her interesting. ("26 Monkeys, also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson.)

Thus, I'd suggest telling us something about Carl that will engage our interest, or sympathy--anything but the dull nature of his life. After all, escaping dullness is one reason to read SF.

Moving on to the trans-temporal flash: although I imagine it's time travel, I'm not really sure what it is, so for me there's no tension, no real hook. I believe that tension and interest come from what the character doesn't know, or fears, not from what the narrator knows but hasn't fully disclosed.

Also, you seem to have an omniscient narrator who knows what will happen before Carl does. I say that because as the story opens, Carl presumably has no idea what a trans-temporal flash is, nor what it will do to him. It's a style common in thrillers but I, personally, cannot immerse in such stories. Immersion is much easier, for me at least, when I'm right alongside the character, knowing what he knows, feeling what he feels--without an omniscient narrator telling me, effectively, "This next bit's good, just watch ..."

So I'd suggest letting us assume Carl's life is ordinary, giving us instead something about him that engages our interest or sympathy, and jumping straight into the trans-temporal flash so we know immediately what it is, and can fear for Carl alongside him as the story unfolds.

I’m finding that the omniscient narrator lends itself to the info-dump-ish blocks of exposition that you all pointed out. I’m not sure that I know how to get around that, as the narrator needs to have an identifiable voice, but is not directly part of the action. Maybe I’ll re-read Hitchhiker’s Guide and see if anything clicks for me ( I think Adams used 3po ).

I get that my protagonist isn’t very likable, though. And that drafting him that way might make it hard for a reader to get into the story. I’ll probably come back to this in a few weeks and give it another go.

If anyone knows of any good examples of narration in the third person omniscient, let me know. It isn’t a popular style, but it was fun to write in.

1. you're describing a guy who doesn't sound all that interesting.

compounded by the fact that:

2. Your just describing him to us. He's not "doing" anything at this point. The narrator is simply describing him. If it was an ordinary guy doing something interesting, or an interesting guy doing something ordinary, either would be better to hook the reader in. Or at the very least if you could find some interesting words or phrases to describe his "ordinary-ness" if that is the point to his existance.

As it currently stands, I'm sorry, but I'm not all that interested in reading more.

Just so no one else has to do it, Tollbooth starts out with:
"Once there was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always.
When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. . . . Nothing really interested him - least of all the things that should have."

However, if that's not the tone you're trying to set (light, and humorous), you might want to reconsider it.

I think you spell out the numbers.

Most of the comments here, to me, are an example of a tendency of writer/critiques, especially here where we have what to me is the first 13 restriction, to expect a little too much of the very, very begining of a story.

I, too, have seen this method or aproach used before, so I don't think there is anything wrong with it, intrinsically. Yes, the character is unlikeable, but I dont think he' supposed to be. And yes, he isn't doing anything but its the very begining of the story we're finding out who he is, before he starts doing stuff.