I have a new work in progress, the first draft of which is taking shape here. I call it The Unlucky Thirteen. Its genesis is an incident that occurs in my first novel, Banana Republican Blues, previously known as Moonbeam Highway, and totally ignored before that as Gopher Anus Chili. It concerns the murder of thirteen parasite capitalists on a factory floor in Allentown. It’s a mystery to anyone who hasn’t read the other book, and a farce to anyone who has.
I’ve decided to share my creative process (a term I use advisedly for the sake of SEO,) and invite whoever reads this blog to join me as I go. I have only the faintest notion now what form the work will take. It will either be a novel or a series of shorts. The one thing I can promise is there will be a story in it somewhere, probably in the conflict between the two investigators working on the case. I’ve mind-mapped the characters but that is all for now, in terms of preparation. I do research online as needed as the characters shape the plot.
Story is an enduring human need, and no imaginative literature is complete without it. You can play all the games you want to with form, as certain avant-gardists do, but the avant-garde is a modernist notion, to which we are said to be post post, so what exactly is the point if you’re not going to be read anymore one generation hence, and people will ignore you as so whenever. My stories concern the depredations of power and privilege, something else that will always be with us. They are my response to the class warfare that is being waged upon us from above.