COMING SOON!

John and the Mother Goose: The Carnival of Tales has not yet been published.

The Story

John, the writer, suddenly finds himself on the midway of a carnival of Mother Goose fairy-tales. He is greeted by Jack – of Jack and Jill fame – who tells John that Mother Goose is expecting him, as she has a role for him to play. But why does Mother Goose assume that John is a mystery-writer? And why does she greet John as almost a long-lost son? And why do so many of the fairy-tale characters have a tale that they want John to write for them instead of the ones in which they have lived for hundreds of years? John is not a mythical creature – he’s only a human, after all – but can he save the Mother Goose Carnival? Can he solve the mystery of the vanishing fairy-tales?

The Making of Mother Goose

This journal records the author’s reflections on the process of the crafting of the novella as it evolved through the stages of planning, writing, editing and polishing. It constitutes an effort to be as conscious as possible of the process whereby the single idea that suggested the topic of the novella was expanded into a complex work of art. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of writing to the nature of the novella as an art-form.

Planning Mother Goose

During the writing of the novella, the author kept a notebook which records the day-by-day development of the novella as it found its shape and style. The notebook – now in print form – reveals how a vast cluster of thoughts was sifted, selected, structured and polished into book-form.

The Project

Together, this novella, journal and notebook comprise the thirty-third installment in an on-going novel-writing project in which the author is exploring the concept of form and meaning in the novel, and of the novel as a form of expression in the 21st Century. All of the published journals and notebooks are available for free download.