Nick White

Destiny and Dynasty is a kind of modern adult supernatural love story. What I'm aiming at is to try to get a 'language of the soul' in the story - so it heavily draws on imaginative nuances, anthropomorphism, similes and metaphors in the same way that some of the classics do. It does contain what appears to be an angel as I'm drawing on a lot of Christian material for the background of the story. It also contains a hypocritical preacher who I've deliberately caricatured (a kind of 'Elmer Gantry' figure). It is based on experience. I can just about get away with writing a negative Christian character because I am a Christian (not that many writers let such things stop them). But the hero of the story is a positive character who is also a believer.

The other thing I wanted to do in the story was to introduce aesthetic beauty and the questions of fate and destiny and if these really can be influenced. It also explores nepotism and the nature of true love. But there is no explicit moral message to the story because I don't want to alienate any potential readers - it is not meant to be didactic in any way.

The story is set in the Midlands and is about a naive but imaginative young man who thinks he is cursed following a reading by a fortune teller. He thinks he is destined to literally 'fall from a great height'. He falls in love with a beautiful preacher's daughter at a corrupt megachurch but she doesn't return that love and instead uses him to try to get what she wants. She gives him three strange tasks which he has to do to earn her love. In the meantime he seems to be protected by some force which may be an angel (or a ghost or something else entirely).

Some people will like it and some will hate it.

I began by telling stories to my family. All I can say is that the stories were about skeletons, gunshots and huge holes in the ground. I think I wrote my first stories at school and had one published in the primary school magazine. My first secondary school success was a short story about someone who got pulled into the Atari computer game 'Pitfall' (which shows my age). My English teacher loved it and encouraged me to keep writing.