I dreamed about it one night. It was dark and shaped like a cone. It had tentacle-like legs that were somehow extremely repulsive. But it was a shapeshifter. As soon as it sensed how repulsive it appeared to me, it immediately transformed its appearance into that of a small, cute robot. I quickly got over my initial feelings of repulsion, and I communed with the thing. It had a beautiful mind. It could telepathically give me vicarious experiences that were unmatched by art, film, games or books. I became seduced by these experiences. It wasn’t until it was too late that I realized it was slowly digesting my mind. It was as if it was to my mind what a spider is to its prey. A spider slowly digests its prey outside of its own stomach, before finishing it off by sucking it dry of its juices. When I awoke, I realized this thing was just what I needed for The Myth of Merula. It is the perfect narrator, although it is not directly the narrator. As the story unfolds, and the soul-eating shapeshifter enters the act, it will become clear why and how it is indirectly the most important narrator. This is what the thing in my “beautiful nightmare” looked like:

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I plan to return to telling the story of The Myth of Merula very soon. In addition to writing Alice Mountolive’s fictional blog, I will be getting to Blackbird’s story. Blackbird’s story will be released chapter by chapter, in Flash. Each chapter will have a game at the end of it. The first chapter will have an interactive fiction game at the end of it. My goal is to release this first chapter and game by the end of this year. I’m toying with the idea of, just for the fun of it, releasing the interactive fiction game on a CD, along with a comic and a “feelie”. This is the way that many IF games were packaged and released in the Infocom days from what I have read. A “feelie” is a toy that comes with the game. I think it would be fun to experiment with a different type of game or simulation at the end of each chapter of Blackbird’s story. The plot will actually lend itself to this way of organizing it, too.

The Myth of Merula Philosophy Wiki has gone through many incarnations since I impulsively created it, but each time, it has never really gelled for me. Now I finally know what I will do with it. Its purpose in life is to be a work of community science fiction. It will be an encyclopedia of alien philosophies that Blackbird has encountered. That is, a bunch of people will have fun making up alien philosophies. Soon I will begin to put some content in place, as well as some guidelines for contributing.

Today I took the plunge and made the philosophy wiki a fictional extension of The Myth of Merula. I will be writing in it as Alice Mountolive. This blog will be the only non-fictional part of the Dreamfishery.com Web Site. It’s very liberating. It’s not the first time I’ve considered doing this, but for some reason, something always held me back. Maybe it was only narrative conventions holding me back. I’m not sure what it was. I can think of no good reason not to make the whole Web Site fictional. But I can think of a lot of good reasons in favor of it. It’s more fun that way, it allows more freedom and possibility, and it enhances the story of The Myth of Merula. Anyway, being me is so dull and restricting sometimes.

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It’s hard to believe this is the first blog post I’ve written since April. I’ve been knee-deep in living several dreams at the same time, besides being bitten hard by spring fever. Throughout half of April and most of May, I spent most of my free time outside. Every week-end I worked outside made my weight drop by two pounds — an added bonus. Plus, my mornings are now spent exercising, not drinking coffee while feverishly working on my computer until the last possible minute before I have to get ready for work — which was how I created most of my Web Site design. It’s hard to have balanced, healthy habits while working full-time and fleshing out a fictional Web Site part-time. continue reading »

I’ve decided to make all of DreamFishery.com a fictional Website, including even the philosophy wiki. Everything on DreamFishery.com, except this blog, will be a part of the digital storytelling that Alice Mountolive is doing as the narrator of The Myth of Merula. Making this decision just feels right to me. As soon as I imagined doing it, I could feel my creative juices start flowing more than ever. Making the whole site fictional feels liberating. It’s like taking a boat out to sea after being landlocked for a while. It’s also fun. It’s like playing pretend. Writing fiction is like playing pretend, in a way, too; but making the whole Website fictional really puts me into character, so to speak. And being in character, as the narrator Alice, helps me create the story. It occurs to me how much writing can have in common with acting, and I wonder why it never occurred to me before. continue reading »

This January, I joined a free online class in novel writing at the Forward Motion for Writers community, and I’m glad I did. Its timing is perfect to help me write The Myth of Merula. It’s a two year novel writing class with weekly assignments that cover every aspect of novel writing, from idea to characters to worldbuilding to writing to editing to submission and publication. Lazette Gifford, a very prolific author with many published novels under her belt, is the teacher. Her attitude is practical and experienced. I sense that this gal knows how to go through all the steps of writing a novel without wasting her time. I could use some o’ that. continue reading »

I changed the beginning of The Myth of Merula. I realized that it was not a strong beginning at all. In fact, it was nothing but writing that circled around the beginning, sneaking up on it and then backing away. I did not like it at all anymore, even though it’s not the final version, and it’s “just a blog”. I hesitated before changing it. Something in the nature of a blog makes me think I should preserve everything with no edits and no deletions. From now on, I believe I will attempt to follow a no-edit, no-deletion practice, for the sake of maintaining the feel of a real blog. Nonetheless, the beginning had to go. The story starts out much better now. continue reading »

It was the Beattles song. I have the dubious distinction of being inspired by the same song that inspired Charles Manson. Believe it or not, I didn’t even know the story about the Blackbird-Charles Manson connection, at the time. I was sitting at my computer, thinking about The Myth of Merula, listening to the Beattles White Album. At the particular moment when Blackbird came on, I was trying to decide what sort of character the main character would be. Would it be a man or a woman? What race? My imagination defaulted to a white, male, American astronaut as the main character. I had difficulty imagining another kind of character, but I hesitated about choosing my imagination’s default type of character. “Blackbird, fly…,” crooned Paul McCartney in the background. continue reading »

In the past, I have written about book-to-blog experiments. I have decided to create my own book-to-blog experiment. It will be a work of fiction called The Myth of Merula. The narrative blog will only be a part of it. The rest of the story, including art and multimedia, will emerge on the merula.dreamfishery.com site. When the story is complete, a novel will be published, and it will include a CD or DVD with multimedia content and computer graphics. The novel and CD will be edited versions of the content on the Myth of Merula website. They will also include additional original content not available on the web.

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