Monday, October 8, 2012

Guest Post, by Gabriel Fitzpatrick: Falling for a Professional Liar
























Today on the blog, finishing up on his Literary+ Blog Tour, we have Gabriel Fitzpatrick. He's been busy this past week and a half on tour, promoting his new book Rmnce. With that wee intro out of the way, I'll hand you over to Gabriel.



Falling for a Professional Liar


There are those who say that dating people who lie for a living is a loaded prospect. It’s a mindset which is not hard to fathom, since trust forms such a core part of most people’s conception of romantic love, and a large part of the cynical side of trust is in the ability to detect when the other person is lying. The more a person lies, as the reasoning goes, the better they get at it, and the harder it becomes to separate fact from fiction.

This last collocation, fact from fiction, is fortuitous since it leads us to the particular breed of professional liar which is relevant to my world: That is, fiction writers. While actors, poker players, and politicians are experienced in the practical side of lying, being practiced in telling lies, writers exist on the other side of the coin, being practiced in inventing lies. We spend our days and nights sitting at computers lying to empty pages, wracking our brains to come up with plausible falsehoods which can be woven together into a grand narrative of abject fiction.

So, the question becomes, how can one be expected to trust such a person? A professional liar must surely have a greater propensity to dissemblance than one who only lies casually, a hobbyist liar if you will. Yet this is a question which acts on presumptions which need not be true.

The most interesting of these is that it is always assumed that the truth, honesty as a practice, is the ideal to be striven for in a romantic relationship. One could, I hope, certainly imagine a relationship which might go quite beautifully built on a foundation of lies, provided the liar could maintain them as if they were the truth without any cracks forming (and who better to create a rock-solid foundation for such an arrangement than a writer?) and crafted them in such a way as to serve a desired purpose.

Most people who claim to want the truth want, instead, the sensation of being told the truth in conjunction with the pleasantness of a lifestyle without strife. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. Thus, from a purely utilitarian standpoint, the standpoint of the maximization of subjective happiness, a benevolent, well-intentioned professional liar is perhaps the best possible partner. Capable of building for their lover a beautiful world, a beautiful fiction in which they may both live happily, a professional liar can bear the burden of reality unilaterally; two professional liars in conjunction can very nearly escape the fundaments of relationship reality entirely, a state which seems quite pleasant to contemplate.

Gabriel’s new book, Rmnce, hit 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.

Buy on Amazon
Buy on Smashwords

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