DreamFishery.com

Hello, and thanks for stopping by my Website. My pen name is Jennifer Franklin Elrod, and my first novel in progress is a web experiment that all can follow here. It is the center of DreamFishery.com, and I call it The Myth of Merula.

The Myth of Merula

The Myth of Merula is a blog-to-book story and more. It's a fictional Website that will fill out with many kinds of content as the story progresses. When the story is complete, I'll edit it into a novel manuscript and seek publication. I plan to include a DVD with the book when I publish it.

The fictional narrator of The Myth of Merula, Alice Mountolive, is a student completing her masters degree in digital storytelling. She has received a grant to digitially archive the story of Blackbird, a mysterious, secluded former astronaut.

Blackbird, born among the Dogon people of Africa, was adopted by a wealthy American celebrity when a little girl. After coming to America, she proved a child prodigy, graduating from high school at sixteen. After completing a degree in astrophysics, she went to work for NASA. While at NASA, she made a space trip to Mars that was subsequently covered up.

The suppressed story of Blackbird's trip to Mars and back has spawned conspiracy theories. She was threatened with incarceration in a mental institution if she told her story. So she chose to return to her childhood village among the Dogon. She has passed her days there quietly and alone ever since, filling her small cottage with strange artwork and inventions, rarely seeing visitors. Among the people in her region of Africa, she is called Merula, which means Blackbird. Among skeptics who have debunked conspiracy theories about her Mars journey, her story is known as The Myth of Merula.

Alice Mountolive will be interviewing Blackbird, recording transcripts of her hpynotic regression sessions, scanning and photographing her artwork, creating 3D models of her strange inventions, and more. She's blogging and working on a gallery. Who knows what she'll do in the future? She may need to use the comic art form to convey Blackbird's recovered memories, when words fail. She may need to create games to capture some of the experiences that Blackbird went through. All I can say for sure is that she's determined to archive as much of Blackbird's story as she can, no matter how many forms of media this challenge requires. The Myth of Merula blog will contain links to all the content that Alice creates, and it will tell the story of her obsession with uncovering Blackbird's story.