Memphis Blues Again: January 2013

29 January 2013

New Orleans from Space, again.

28 January 2013

Ronald D Smith's Book -- Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General .

Historian Ron Smith discusses his new book Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General. Smith takes readers back to Bleeding Kansas, with its border ruffians and land speculators, to show how Thomas Ewing Jr. and his family played pivotal roles in the history of Kansas, Missouri, and the nation. This event took place on October 21, 2009, at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th Street, Kansas City, MO.

Amazon link.

26 January 2013

The Land Where the Blues Began.

Watch The Land Where the Blues Began.

Peter Joseph Osterhaus.

An interesting website I've just discovered about Peter Joseph Osterhaus.

25 January 2013

The Search For Robert Johnson.

23 January 2013

Preparing for Draft 2.

I think last night I hit upon a strategy for writing the next iteration of this novel.

The first step will to be to generate a rather massive tree-like structure that connects all my many story threads not in time but in space. What matters most is the intersecting locations, or nodes, where the paths cross. This will take quite some time. Afterwards I'll be rewriting everything to conform to the new blueprint; this will include generating a great deal of new material (although I've had much of it in mind for a few years now), and also transforming much of the material already set down in the first draft into a new form, especially taking expository material and relocating it in the actions and memories of heretofore unwritten scenes and characters. When all this is accomplished, the second draft will be complete.

Eventaully, in a third draft, I should be able to cut and move big chunks of the massive text around into a more aesthetically-pleasing presentation, even as I'm honing and loping down the word count. How long will all this take?

Umm . . . probably a couple years.

(I'm certain to also be writing some other stuff during this time frame.)

21 January 2013

Concerning today's South.

No one needs better health care more than the South, but it fights it off so long as Obama is offering it, its governors turning down funds for Medicaid. This is a region that rejects sex education, though its rate of teenage pregnancies is double and in places triple that of New England. It fights federal help with education, preferring to inoculate its children against science by denying evolution.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jan/21/dumb-america/

New Orleans from space.

St Louis from space.

St Louis, the Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers.

16 January 2013

Prelude to ripping Memphis Blues Again to shreds.

I just spent six months writing the third draft of a novel called Cerberus, which is a kind of novel that has virtually nothing in common with Memphis Blues Again. That's why there's been so little action on this blog for so long. However, I'm getting ready now to dive back into Memphis Blues Again in a big way, so it may be that there will be more to see here in the months to come.

I am now a different person than I was when I wrote the first draft of this colossus, and my conception of MBA is now far different than it was then. This novel has ballooned far beyond its germinal conception, its blood-thirsty roots having ripped and clawed down through deep time, tapping into the water tables of secret history. Its main characters remain a small group of friends traipsing through the South in 2010, but other characters and their tales have welled up as well, and all must be properly written and inter-cut together into a new plastic unity. Therefore I must pull apart all that I've written so far, and outline all those precedent stories that I have in mind but that remain as yet unwritten, and figure out how properly to weave it all together into a different novel than what currently exists. What's gone before are notes and sketches for the real McCoy.

Few modern readers ever perceive beyond plot, that mechanical skeleton which jerks so rhythmically and redundantly through the shallow morality plays shackling the soul, mind-numbing in their dishwater-conventionality, turning human beings into wharfside mountains of stunned, dull-eyed fish. MBA is not and will not be a novel that panders to such conditioned desires. Plot is the least interesting element of a tale: it provides the skeleton wherein hangs the substance which, one hopes, may sufficiently startle the reader into a new experience of the world.