The joy of blogging

Clemency Slaughter and the Legacy of D’Eath

Last week I mentioned that Jonathan Green and Tom Brown have a cool project on Kickstarter (and both of their surnames are colours, which just makes me happy). We were chatting online and I offered to put up a guest post about it, so you guys could find out more if it intrigues you. Jonathan whizzed this over to me in record time, just as I was leaving for a long weekend in London.

D’oh. Anyway, I’m back and thought you might like to have a read whilst I run around like Chicken Licken, preparing for Eastercon and the zillion other things I need to do.

Over to you, Jonathan!

Clemency Slaughter and the Legacy of D’Eath is unlike anything I’ve ever written before.

First of all it’s not steampunk, or SF, or a Fighting Fantasy gamebook. In fact it has ended up inhabiting the same dark, gothic, nineteenth century world as Poe, Sleepy Hollow, and American Gothic. Secondly, it’s a poem. I don’t usually write poetry (apart from that Moshi Monster Christmas book that one time) and it’s certainly not something I’m known for. And thirdly, I wrote it in an afternoon, following a conversation on Facebook with the artist Tom Brown.

Tom and I had met at Weekend at the Asylum (Europe’s largest Steampunk convention, held annually in the city of Lincoln) and I was immediately blown away by his artwork. I knew, from that moment, that this was someone I wanted to work with – but on what?

Only a matter of days later, we were conversing via the medium of social media and an idea popped into my head, right then and there. I honestly have no idea where the idea came from. It just felt like a story that needed to be told, as if it had been waiting there, in the ether, like a thread drifting on the wind, until someone caught hold of that thread and pulled, teasing it out into a tale all of its own.

Two and a half hours later, the first draft of what was to become Clemency Slaughter and the Legacy of D’Eath was finished. (If only all my projects were done and dusted so quickly!) And now, several months later, we have a publisher on board – NewCon Press – and a Kickstarter up and running to fund production.

“But what is it?” I hear you ask.

Well, a nutshell, it’s a book, written by me (Jonathan Green) and fully illustrated by Tom Brown (the artist behind the Professor Elemental comic and the creator of Hopeless, Maine). At first it appears to be a children’s picture book, but in reality it is something much darker and more adult, as becomes apparent once you start to unravel the tale held within its stanzas. It tells the tale of Miss Clemency Slaughter, her ill-fated family, and the legacy of Lord Daedalus Drummond D’Eath that awaits whoever is lucky (or unlucky) enough to inherit after the old patriarch dies.

Children of all ages will enjoy the book’s mix of macabre humour and beautiful illustration, but Clemency Slaughter and the Legacy of D’Eath will only become a reality if YOU (and your friends) pledge your support via Kickstarter. We are offering all sorts of wonderful rewards to our benevolent backers, including the chance to be at the London launch (complete with champagne reception) or to own an original piece of Tom Brown’s stunning artwork for the book.

And that’s the wonder of Kickstarter; it allows truly unique projects – like Clemency Slaughter – to exist, in a world in which publishing appears to be dominated by the need to pigeonhole products. And I defy anyone to pigeonhole Clemency Slaughter and the Legacy of D’Eath.

You can find out more about the Clemency Slaughter Kickstarter project, and pledge your support, here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1412864360/clemency-slaughter-and-the-legacy-of-death

And on that note I’ll leave you. But just remember this, if you’re umming and ahhing about whether to splash your cash on the project: you can’t take it with you.