The Book That Will Change Literature: A Guest Post from New Author C.J. Duarte

Greetings everyone and Happy New Year!

Megan McDade was kind enough to invite me for a guest post here so I'll try to make the most of it. As it states above, I'm a new author and am based in Canada. My only previously published writing was a flash-fiction piece in 2003. However, that seemingly tiny achievement inspired me to take the much bigger creative journey of writing this massive work: my first novel, The Dash, which I was fortunate enough to have published a few months ago.

I have enjoyed creative writing for as long as I can remember; it's one of the few things I've been able to do quite well for many years. What I love about writing as well as reading is the more solitary nature of it, and the way in which you can infer so many things just from a few simple characters on a page. (And by characters I also mean letters, numbers, designs, etc., not simply people in a story.) It's such a primal, wonderful form of expression that it never stops impressing me how many layers I can find, even in the most classic of literature that's been analyzed over and over again. This is the type of old-fashioned wonder and variety that I hope more writers can bring into their work, as I hope to bring it into my own.

On that note--The Dash is an experimental novel for general adult readers, and it spans so many different characters, storylines, styles and themes that it's virtually impossible to summarize, even for me. The most basic premise, though, is of a young writer named Claire Bead who has a strange near-death experience that literally sends her into another dimension. It is often implied that this new world is some kind of afterlife for Claire, as it is populated with many familiar impressions, shocking distortions, peaceful beauty, and really odd asides--an oversaturated picture of someone's chaotic mind just before they seem to lose it forever.

So why have I billed The Dash as "The Book That Will Change Literature," and why should you bother reading it as such? Because it's truly like no other book you've read before, and it's like no other book you'll read again. It's a story about birth, death, and everything around and in between...It's a story about self-discovery, reader interaction, high tragedy, slapstick, relationships, icons, mysticism, conspiracy, and very long stretches of boredom and possibly madness...It's a story about stories...And it's a story that most people will either love or hate--but fortunately, I think that those who love it, will love it a lot.

Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Megan for this opportunity to share my work.

C.J. Duarte

www.thedashnovel.blogspot.com