| Unfortunately, the July Kickstarter campaign has been cancelled as it was fairly obvious that it would not meet its goal. There are several reasons that have been identified, that will be addressed and fear not a revamped more focussed campaign will be launched in the coming months. |
It’s the middle of summer and I suspect the last thing you’ll be thinking about is Valentine’s Day 2020. But with ONLY a little over 200 days to go, time is rapidly running out to find that special gift that expresses just how much you really love your partner. Don’t settle for the usual last-minute token flowers, unimaginative restaurant booking or guilt fuelled Amazon panic buys. Get your true love something unique, something memorable, something that shows you were thinking of them now and you’ll be thinking of them forever, long after one of you is DEAD!
Get them the gift of “Discordant Love Beyond Death” a horror-themed anthology this coming Valentine’s Day!
Not enough? Well, why not immortalise your love by getting their name interwoven into one of the many fantastic stories. It’ll mean far more than another generic heart-shaped card.
Yes, I’m afraid this is a shameless plug for a book, one I’ve had the enormous pleasure of contributing to. Discordant Love Beyond Death is an anthology of 22 macabre short stories that explore the subject of what happens to love after death and is being crowdfunded on Kickstarter until the end of July 2019. So if you, or better still your partner, like your indie literature dark, varied and thought-provoking, treat yourselves to something a little special this coming Valentine’s day.
I can assure you my writing is a little better than my attempts at sales patter. This is my first fledging efforts to take my writing from the world of online flash fiction into actual print and I couldn’t be in better company with so many talented writers contributing to the anthology:
I love the challenge of writing prompts and “Love after Death” was a great open-ended idea that offered so many possibilities, especially when you consider the many forms of love beyond the obvious romantic cliches. My original concept was to write a story that somehow explored all the classical forms of love in a single tale. But it soon became painfully obvious that it would read more like an academic treatise than any form of entertainment, not to mention the pressure of an 8k word goal. That said I did manage to keep the seed of this idea in the final Darkness Indivisible contribution as it attempts to explore different types of love, relationships and how they change.
Other influences in my contribution keep the classic theme; as I wanted the story to be a journey similar to Dante’s, but rather than a hellish landscape the journey would be through time with its own rich tapestry of horrors, The biggest influence was Milton’s infinitely quotable Paradise Lost the title and ultimately the core of the story being inspired by the passage:
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
I find huge inspiration in music and Mumford and Son’s album Delta was probably the biggest overall influence on the tone of the story. Practically the lyrics of every track (Guiding Light, If I say, Rose of Sharon and of course Darkness Indivisible) are intermeshed in some form consciously or not into every chapter, all summed up in the track “42” which is practically a parable for Darkness Indivisible and highly worth a listen.
Now I’m loathed to give away any more details for fear of spoiling the story but if you want a taste of what you can expect then feel free to peruse some of the other short stories on the site (links below).
Finally, a big thanks to Mumford and Son’s for their brilliant and truly inspirational album and an even bigger thanks to Dickon Springate at Beyond Death Publishing for conceiving and creating the project.
Cover image courtesy of James Discombe