Prelude to ripping Memphis Blues Again to shreds.

Copyright © 2013 Bob R Bogle

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.