Indie April#7: Magpies of Misanthropy

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 (I know, I know, this bits always the same in these posts, look just skip down a paragraph why don’t you…) 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 Tales of Tantamount: Meredith Debonnaire

Meredith Debonnaire is a young unrepentant bibliobibuli who claims to be in training to be a hermit, and sometimes vanish for a long long time into the depths of her brain and only emerge months later, possibly wiser and in need of hot chocolate. With a degree of self-knowledge, few ever attain, she has been known to claim ‘There is an 80% chance that I am talking total bollocks, but I’m afraid I can’t say for certain.’ But if this is the case it is bizarre bouncy fizzy frivolously fascinating bollocks (this sentence may have gotten away from me, but let’s not dwell on it). If she is sane, only the magpies know, and they are intransigent in the telling of their secrets…

Tales from Tantamount is, well, somewhat eclectic. It is many things and can be read as many things. It is easier to say what it is not, what it is not is the corpse of an idiosyncratic French poet reanimated by Salvador Dali then forced to recite the history of a town in verse while constructing a 1/1 scale model of Stonehenge on the southern coast of Playa Traviata on a wet weekend in July… Tales from Tantamount is definitely not that, for a start, the poet isn’t French… What it actually is is a bunch of fictional snippets from a year in the life of an odd little town somewhere never the river Seven, where Historian is a somewhat more exciting if generally short-lived profession, on account of history in the town been a tad fluid, particularly on Wednesdays. As it should be added is some of the architecture. You can, so Meredith informs us, find out more at the Tantamount public Library, which is probably at the bottom of the high street today, but we can not say for certain, it is the year of the sad plastic bag after all… Just don’t head down there between 2:15 and 2:35 as that’s when the Carrion is due, and it’s best not to be on the streets at that point…

You can find out more about the history of a small town near the river Seven that never was, and the dark secrets that lay in wait in its carrion haunted streets at https://meredithdebonnaire.wordpress.com/ and soon, or so the magpies tell me, in a rare moment of forthcoming, be a collected and expanded Tales of Tantamount in paperback, with lost of extra stuff even some art by Tom Brown of Hopeless Maine fame, because strange towns on the edge of reality tend to cling together, or possibly fight wars of poetic fury, its hard to be sure. But I for one and looking forward to it. (I’m a fan in case this post was not a clue)

Meredith also has a novella out there in the world called ‘The Life and Times of Angel Evens’ I have not read this due to the problem with the earth’s rotational speed influencing the day-night cycle in limitation of the number of hours in the day. Because it sounds interesting and I want to, so at some point, I will.

This is normally where I do the earlier posts bit, but there ain’t any, so instead here is a public warning notice form Tantamount Town council, there may be a link to further things connected to it, I dare you to click on it… Go on just click on it, you know you want to…

Aside from her own novels, and weirdness, Meredith’s blog is also followed by at least two of the writers in the Harvey Duckman Presents Anthologies. Which is the most tenuous link yet 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 … There may not be the secrets of magpies within its pages but there are 14 other Indie writers of SciFi, Fantasy, Steampunk and Horror within its folds, so you could do worse than get yourself a copy, so click on the lovely picture below 🙂 More indie April shots coming soon with Tom & Nimue Brown the creators of another odd place on the edge of imagination, Hopeless Maine…

Disclaimer: normal service will resume shortly when I stop trying to channel Meridieth Debonnaire’s own brand of sanity and return to writing these from my own. Besides, frankly, she is better at writing like herself than I am, odd that.

Additional: Meredith is now releasing the complete Tales from Tantamount in an ink and paper format popular in libraries and retailers of such things. It not released yet, but details will follow when it is no doubt as I intend to buy one at the first opportunity to do so. While it is still being compiled, edited and in possibly written in some respects, there is a cover by the endlessly talented Tom Brown of Hopeless Maine fame. So until I can put a link up for the book itself, here’s a peek at the cover… try not to dribble when you behold it…