Today I bring to you a guest post from Gabriel Fitzpatrick.
Gabriel’s new book, Rmnce, hits digital shelves October 1st! Find it on Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords.
Rmnce series is a love story told in 4 parts. It follows a couple from the first drunkenly passionate days of their college romance all the way through a life together, often tumultuous, always overwhelming, and overridingly disquieting as only true love can be.
Rmnce is not, however, your traditional love story. Or perhaps more accurately, it does not appear to be your traditional love story. It is written entirely through the communications of the couple. Text messages, emails, and even a few old-fashioned letters make up the entirety of a story, what one early reader termed “A story not so much written as formed organically in the negative space.”
It is, in short, a commentary on love in the digital age, a tribute to the great love affairs of the digital generation, romance not lost in the sea of text-speak and instant gratification, but merely obscured from the prying eyes of those too far removed from its cultural roots.
My writing is often called ‘experimental.’ I may have even said it once or twice myself. Experimental, though, is the word we use to describe things that don’t yet have a proper box. Whether something is a century old or an hour, once it has a proper box it can be put into it ceases to be experimental. At most, it can continue to be avant garde or possibly forward thinking.
Yet the real sense, the traditional meaning of experimental is that it consists of experiments, of things which might or might not work and which one cannot fully understand without trial, and in some ways this is also true. Rmnce could fairly be called a gamble if the creation of something worthwhile was my goal, because setting out I truly didn’t know if it could be done. While I was certain that art could be made from that much maligned vernacular dialect known as text speak, I didn’t know if the ideas I had in mind for the piece could be carried across, or that if they could I was the one to do it.
The inherent risk in it, though, is what makes it worth doing. It breaks boxes, challenges notions, and above all else it has the potential to result in work which is beyond what currently exists. While never having been a proponent of progress per se, we must nonetheless acknowledge the value in novelty, in taking things to places they have not yet been. To be able to say one has made something which does not exist is a sensation not to be underestimated.