It’s Indie April, a celebration of all things Indie, be it novels, movies, music or art. The idea being to encourage interaction between indie creatives, and that most elusive of beasties the wider audience, and it is a time to celebrate all those wonderful indie creatives and their work.  As a writer, my focus (yes, okay, I know, but I have to write this bit…) is on bringing indie writers to your attention. So for the rest of the month, I will be periodically featuring some of the best the independent scene has to offer. Some of these will be names familiar to those who read my blog, some will be new, but all of them are undoubtedly wonderful and deserving of a wider audience. So take the plunge and invest in some indie goodness, give an indie writer a try, I guarantee you’ll not regret it.

The Boston Metaphysical Society: Madeleine Holly-Rosing

A TV, feature film and comic book writer, Madeleine is the winner of the Sloan Fellowship for screenwriting, and the Gold Aurora and Bronze Telly for a PSA produced by Women In Film. She also won numerous awards while completing the UCLA MFA Program in Screenwriting. Having run a number of successful crowdfunding campaigns for her comic, Boston Metaphysical Society, Madeleine now teaches a crowdfunding class for independent creators at Pulp Fiction Books in Culver City as well as guest lecturing at Scriptwriters Network and Dreamworks. She also finds time to actually write books…

Great Houses jockey for power, treachery, subterfuge, and demonic threats.  In an alternate-history Boston of 1890. Madeleine’s is a world of steam power, airships, mixed with ghostly goings-on, preta-natural powers and class struggles. Boston is a city divided by wealth and privilege. Great houses rule like feudal lords of old while their vassal’s shelter beneath their banners, while on the south side of the city those without the protection of house live lives of coal soot squaller. (confession time, I am only about a third of the way through A Storm of Secrets as I write this, and need to get this blog out because I have a list of others I need to do before the end of the month… It is, however, a wonderfully engrossing read.) Madeleines world is vivid, and fully realised, the way any tale set in an alternative history should be, merging real history with the possibilities of another path which could have been taken. Drawing on the comic’s, this first novel has a depth to it that, along with the superb writing, makes it easy to slide between the pages, and wonder at a Boston that never was…

You can find out more about the history of a Boston that never was, and the dark secrets that lay in wait in its fog-bound streets at http://bostonmetaphysicalsociety.com/  and you can, of course, find Madeleine’s books and graphic novels on Amazon and elsewhere, including her guide to creators using Kickstarter, on which she is something of an expert, if not indeed the queen.

Earlier posts…

• Interview with Madeleine Holly-Rosin
• Review of A Storm of Secrets ( coming soon I promise)

Aside from her own novels, Madeleine also has liked at least half a dozen of my posts about the Harvey Duckman Presents Anthologies. on facebook and twitter. Which is a tenuous link even by my standards but it remains just waiting for you to read, though the first print run has sold out rather quickly, so it’s now paperbacks are only available on POD … Madeleine may not have a story in there but a couple of writers of Steampunkery and 12 other Indie writers of SciFi, Fantasy, and Horror do, so you could do worse than get yourself a copy, so click on the lovely picture below 🙂  More indie April shots coming soon with Meridieth Debonnaire the creator of the utterly awesome Tales from Tandamount, who is also not in Harvey Duckman, but only because the Magpies stopped her I suspect…