If I may steal your attention for a moment, I’d like to introduce Gabriel Fitzpatrick. I could call him a wanderer, a dissident, a refugee, a hedonist, or a romantic since he is so well-traveled, but I think the best descriptor might be the author of the upcoming Rmnce, which will be available October 1.
They say art is pain. They say the same thing of love and beauty, and while these sorts of platitudes are the written equivalent of drunken regret the parallel has a bit of validity. Art IS pain, it is very much the emptying of a tortured soul onto a page, a canvass, or a stage. And what more ubiquitous and artful agony is there than that of romantic love? It is the defining pain of human existence, a fragile and tempestuous emotion; it builds on itself exponentially until it either reaches a sort of Singularity, a critical mass which alters its form subtly into a force harder than steel, or else collapses under its own weight like a star with the tiniest bit too much mass.
Thus, one will often find that a great writer (painter, actor, musician) will have behind them a tumultuous and nearly self-destructive romantic history. After all, if art is pain, more pain would, it stands to reason, tend to produce more art, whether in the sense of pure mass of production or greater concentration. However, what one has to ask oneself is, do artists become artists because their history of disfiguring romantic entanglements gives them the inspiration to do so, or is the artistic temperament simply prone to the sort of emotional extremes which produce the romances which burn twice as hot and half as long?
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.
Len Berry 