Some of you might have read my Ethereal Pixie Rings Of Mercy (EPROM) story that I posted on steemit some weeks ago and that I used to run a $30 SBD review contest/lottery with. EPROM is a short story about a douchebag angry atheist David finding himself in an unexpected afterlife.

A little while after I had written Ethereal Pixie Rings Of Mercy, originally titled Atheist Afterlife, I ran into a little jewel of a story by David M Kelly, also about a douchebag, Hector, who found himself in an unexpected afterlife in his story Dead Reckoning.

At first, just amused by the overlap I thought nothing much of this, but after I discovered that like me, David has a complicated health history involving chronical disease with a likely very huge metabolic component in its causality, and after reading up on the work of Professor Tim Noakes, the idea of a Dead Douchebag Anthology was born.

Unfortunately, however much I wanted to make the Anthology a success, I'm not really that good at motivating people. At one point in time I had five of the minimum of six slots filled with people having committed to writing a story for the anthology, but then, partially due to me myself being a complete scatterbrain but also the apparent lack of commitment in the people who promised to work on something and then dropped off the grid, today I am no further than I was one year ago when I first created a website dedicated to development of the anthology.

So today, given my recent positive experience with steemit and fiction, I decided to give trying to get this thing up and running a second go.

The first thing I need to admit before starting: I'm a horrible cat-herder. Trying to get artistic types of people, especially fiction authors to live up to their commitments without making them hate you and dropping out of the project anyway is very much a cat-herding project. If you are someone who thinks (s)he is up to the task, please let me know, I really need someone like you to make this into a success.

So with that out of the way, lets discuss the actual anthology, its goals, and its scope.

The Anthology

Quote from the original website:

Ever wonder about the afterlife? What if it exists? What form could it have? What if it was very much different from what anyone expects? And how would a complete douchebag cope with the new reality of his or her afterlife existence? In The Dead Douchebag Anthology, six different indie authors share their unique and thought provoking rendering of a dead douchebags unexpected afterlife.

The Dead Douchebag Anthology aspires to become an anthology of short works of fiction involving a common theme. As the title of the anthology reveals already, the common theme in the stories for this anthology is that of a douchebag or otherwise less charming and agreeable person finding his or her way to an afterlife.

If you have written a short story like that and are able, in terms of copy rights to submit it for our anthology, or if you feel inspired by my post here and think you could write a short story like that, you could get yourself a slot in our anthology.

Contribute

Please note though that submitting the story isn't the end of the line here. It's all about self-publishing as a group, so while editing is important, we don't have funds for hiring a professional editor. Instead, if you submit a story, you also commit yourself to partaking in editing rounds for the work of at least two of your peers.

We aim to publish it as e-book through Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, B&N. Apple and Scribd . It's a group effort on a low, close to zero budget, so everybody will need to chip in to get the quality of the combined work up to the level of a professionally edited work. I truly believe that together we can make this anthology epic.

Medical Research

You won't be making any money from your story being made part of this Anthology. The idea of the anthology arose from my and Davids medical history and the fact that we both agree on the fact that proper scientific medical research is of paramount importance. Modern insights show that diabetes (Davids health problem) and cardiovascular disease (my health problem) might actually be one and the same disease: Metabolic syndrome.

A single disease that is responsible for many premature deaths and reduced quality of life for many more. And here the subject of the Anthology and the subject of our charity touch each other. Death is a difficult subject to talk about, but still an inquiring subject that in speculative fiction has been under-explored. Death from metabolic syndrome shockingly has also been under-explored and scientific research may some day yield new paradigms that could save hundreds of thousands of lives from these diseases. Possibly even without medicine.

As such, the Dead Douchebag Anthology shall be donating all proceeds to a metabolic syndrome related medical research charity. 100% of the proceeds of this anthology shall go to The Noakes Foundation in order to support continued research, in particular to their plans to effectively research the effects of various diets tracked over an extended period. Essential research that could potentially result in diet and lifestyle based cures for some of the most dangerous aspects of metabolic syndrome.

Sign up

If you are interested in making this anthology a reality, either by submitting your story and becoming part of the team, or and this is probably an even more valuabkle role at the moment, you feel up to the task of taking on the role of cat-herder for this project, please comment below and/or contact me on twitter

Oh, and if you can't contribute creatively but happen to be a whale or larger dolphin, while I normally think soliciting upvotes is bad form, as this post is all about gathering support for a good cause, I think this time its not that bad. Realize that your upvote could help in funding for cover art design, helping make this anthology a success.

If you have any other ideas of leveraging the strengths of steemit to make this anthology a success, please comment below and lets see if we can make this thing a reality.